


burn

by aMassiveDisappointment (BadOldWest)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Disfigurement, Eventual Smut, F/M, Healing, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2018-11-02 02:23:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 58,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10935006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/aMassiveDisappointment
Summary: "It’s my face," Jyn thought miserably, tucking her chin into her collar even more than it already was. It almost always was. Ducked low, like a caged animal. "That’s why he avoids me."Cassian and Jyn survive the beach on Scarif. That doesn't mean they're unscathed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Everyone Lives AU that'll make you all happy that everyone died when they did.

_ It’s my face,  _ Jyn thought miserably, tucking her chin into her collar even more than it already was. It almost always was. Ducked low, like a caged animal.  _ That’s why he avoids me.  _

She gripped her dinner tray with white knuckles, forcing herself not to turn around at the retreating back of Cassian Andor. 

It had been four months since Scarif. Chirrut and Baze have recovered and taken their leave from their brief stint as rebellion soldiers. Bodhi had been vetted for his involvement in the Empire and approved for missions. Jyn reluctantly took a mercenary approach to whatever scraps of assignments the rebellion threw her way, she wasn’t wild about rules. She had not recruited herself officially. That meant a single room and to only have to be somewhere when she was summoned. Exactly how she liked it. Cassian returned to his role of Captain with renewed fervor. That was as much as she really knew.

It had been four months since they were plucked off that beach, just in time. Jyn’s life was spared. The skin exposed to the blast was not. 

Jyn looked in the mirror every night and saw a jawline and cheek marred with burns, her right eye white as Chirrut’s and as forever unseeing. At first she covered it with her hair, so it got in the way constantly. Eventually it was back in a barely tamed knot, and her face a mask of bitterness to keep people as far away as possible. 

She couldn’t separate the damage itself from how bad it looked, and longed for someone to ask. Bodhi made a point of kissing her brow, squeezing her hands, trying to impart love and acceptance. Chirrut obviously found no difference, Baze thought it made her look like a warrior. Cassian wouldn’t look at her at all. 

Wouldn’t speak to her. 

They were picked up off that beach in Scarif and resumed themselves. He was curt with her, professional. K2 constantly at his side. The droid once offered her a scrolling list of possible ways to repair the skin of her face, all of which she had been aware of, but even she knew they were expensive and required having an identity recognized by the empire. She nodded along, numb, glancing desperately at Cassian for him to look at her and tell her what he saw was fine. 

“Enough, K2,” Jyn said finally, “tell me the probability of any of these things even happening.”

Cassian hissed between his teeth as K2 told her nearly impossible, marching off with the droid following behind him like a pet. 

His iciness made it clear; two people alone in the face of death wasn’t love, it was desperation, and what happened was not to be applied to their lives, now that they had them back. 

Still, at meals when he passed right by her, like she wasn’t even there, it hurt just as badly as it had the first time. 

She didn’t turn around to see if he looked back. He did. 

 

Every night, Jyn stripped off her dirty clothes and documented the damage. She wasn’t a vain person, but she didn’t want to attract anyone, even before. She wanted not to be stared at. Wanted to blend in. Be invisible. 

Careful fingers prodded the skin, puckered and angry and raw, blistering from brow to chin. Her nose had a sickle-shaped arch splitting it right under her eyes. She was halved by the face she knew and the new face. Halved every time Cassian’s eyes slid over her, her image slick and untouchable. 

She was invisible to him, which was probably for the best. She took low-risk assignments, hazing assignments, boring ones. She was partnered with strangers and treated them as such. There was no big production, no trusted partner in a shoot-out where risks would pay off. It was incredibly boring. Mon Mothma looked at her with a resigned kind of frustration, as though wasting a valuable asset. Jyn wanted to ask her about her expression, because it was through no desire of her own she was all but grounded on base. 

The answer was obvious. 

She was rarely brought into the war room. It was where she’d seen him again, the first time after realizing she’d survived. 

She had assumed he was still in the medbay. She was lightheaded to be seeing him again. There was a moment, flickering and alive, where she realized that she wanted to hold him again. She wanted her life to be a series of moments connecting the span between when she was holding him again. 

She’d never felt that way before. It was so massive, a hole through the entire planet she danced on the edge of. 

She approached him, a tentative smile on her face. She tried to catch his eye from the other side of one of the blue illuminated maps, blinking at him behind glass. She was right on the other side, a hand reaching out to touch the divide between them.

He didn’t look at her. At most his eyes fell lazily on her hand. 

“Clearly we should reprimand you for your rogue mission,” Draven cleared his throat, “But the results were a success. All that loss has at least been for something.”

Cassian looked like the life had left his body. All those soldiers. His friends, Jyn realized. How could that be worth it. 

Mon Mothma cut in; “So I’ll direct the question to you first, Captain, would you like to continue onward with the team you’ve assembled?”

This had to be the plan. They worked so well together. Not just her and him, but Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze. Even K2. Her heart fluttered, because the idea was not just exciting, but almost  _ cozy.  _ For someone who had not had a family in a long time, the idea of a dependable group was incredibly attractive to her. 

Cassian answered, the only words he would utter the entire meeting:

“No, I don’t think that’s best.”

She stared at him the whole meeting, not once did his eyes lift from his superior officers. Jyn agreed to the tentative plan to keep her around, he made no indication that it pleased him. She was dry-mouthed and numb, nodding along because she hadn’t felt that stunned in a long time. Cassian wouldn’t even look at her. He was grim and stoic, the man he was when she met him. Hadn’t changed a bit. All the loyalty he had proven to her was cast at his feet, stepped on by his hard boots. 

When Jyn first saw the burns, she was flippant. She survived. That was enough. She was sure she could even joke about it someday. Tested a few with Bodhi, who kept a loyal vigil at her bedside. He smiled weakly, more for her benefit than his. She already swore to get better at it. Baze laughed. Chirrut as well. They all seemed to know this was how she’d handle this. It was funny. They almost died, was she really going to get upset about half of a face? It would be fine. She still had an eye that worked. She still had a pulse. That was more than she could have asked for. 

She still had Cassian. She assumed he was in bad shape because he never came to her in the medbay. Never checked her progress, sat beside her, tried to cheer her up from the obvious impairment that would always be there. She had worried herself thin over his recovery. 

“He’s fine,” Bodhi would tell her with thin lips, and the rest of Rogue One exchanged conspiratorial glances. She thought he was dying. That they were keeping that from her. It made her sick with worry, worry she couldn’t admit, because what if she pronounced her feelings to a man who was a corpse?

Seeing him in person, in a briefing, not in private, stunned her. Made her agree to things she should have thought through. If he hadn’t come to her, why would she even stay. 

If he couldn’t look at her...

She decided it was her face. 

 

Jyn wore a black patch over the blind eye. Bodhi told her it made her look like a mighty foe, as slinky and hard to catch as Jyn Erso ever was. Baze said it suited her. Chirrut joked that he couldn’t tell the difference, had she done something with her hair? And they all laughed. She was learning to joke, Chirrut had years of practice. 

She sort of liked it, how the patch blended into her messy dark hair, cutting diagonal lines across her face, made her look angular, crooked,  _ bad. _

Cassian looked at her. Across the mess hall. 

She paused, waiting. Maybe it was less repulsive when it was covered. She couldn’t do much about the rest of her face, but this was a start. Maybe something he could meet her halfway on. 

His jaw tightened. He looked, somehow it seemed impossible until it happened before her eyes, even angrier. 

 

They were drunk. Separately, they became so. It made their edges runny and loose, so across the bar, they bled into each other. She could feel it, him radiating out, reaching for her, even slouched in his seat. Cautious eyes met hers. He managed a small smile. 

Jyn wasn’t sure what to do with that. He’d been adamant on returning to his old life, the way he knew how to live, and did not have room for bent rules and her shirked sense of duty. She figured if he had anything to say, he’d come to her. He didn’t come. 

She finished her drink first. She let her eyes wander. Someone at the bar was looking at her. Babyfaced and arrogant. The war hadn’t made him thin yet. She wanted to bite into his flesh. Cassian was lean, hungry looking. She didn’t have what he needed to feed him. She understood his needs, as well as he managed to fail to see hers. She wondered when thinking about him would stop being the constantly running parallel to all of her thoughts, lying underneath, creating the footing for her perspective. 

A triangle formed; a standoff. Cassian glaring at him, looking back at her. Imploring her to drop her gaze from the third party. She flickered her gaze between them ambivalently. 

She wondered what he would give her for choosing him. She did it anyway. 

She stood from the bar, taking a few steps towards the exit just to see what Cassian would do. 

He approached. He looked at her. Right at her. They both swayed on their feet. They could each blame the alcohol. She hadn’t seen her eyes reflected in his since that beach on Scarif. They hadn’t been this close since then. He stood so close she could feel him breathe, like on the elevator. His eyes on hers, just like then. The resignation she saw there. How she just wished he would lower his lips to hers. Just like then.

She remembered his hand bunched in the back of her shirt, trying to bring them closer for their last moments. 

He took her chin in his hand. Stared at her face. She smelled the liquor on him. He was breathing heavily out of his nose, face molded into something dimly resembling stoicism.

She could feel the anger coil around his bones. She wanted to dissolve into nothing as he closely examined her face. 

She still wanted him. She resumed to be the person that died with him.

She realized how long it had been since she’d been touched the second his hand withdrew. 

He let her go, as if waking up, and slipped out the door like a shadow. 

Jyn didn’t see him flex his hand like the nerves were singing. Jyn wasn’t there when he shut himself back in his quarters, placed his brow against the closed door, and struggled to breathe. 

His dreams were all about that beach on Scarif, and one body tucking around the other, and if he had just rested his chin on her other shoulder when she held him. It all would have been different.

 

Bodhi found her hidden behind some of the crates of the cargo bay. Well, he had been directed to her. Some kind-hearted nurse found her there and tastefully let her be, instead asking around about who was particularly close to Jyn Erso, without giving specifics. Until her inquiries reached Bodhi, who went to find Jyn immediately.  

What he saw he wasn’t even sure  _ was _ her; Jyn, very drunk and bleary-eyed, with her face buried in her knees. 

She was used to the leaving. To being left. She was used to it she was used to it she was used to it. 

This was nothing new. She had worn the ache to dull edges with years of practice. Why was it so sharp now?

Her pilot took a knee by her side, no questions asked. She was bitter that the problems were so obvious he didn’t even have to. 

“Everything was already taken from me,” she said, very quietly. She sounded like a child. When Bodhi looked at her, he saw her as Galen Erso described her, a child tangled in a mess she had to fix, even though she had no power in creating it. “I know it’s so small, compared to everything else, but why did this have to happen?”

Bodhi had her hands in his, rubbing soothing circles with his thumbs. 

“Jyn,” he asked very gravely, “Did someone say something?”

She shook her head, wincing because there was a loaded measure to his tone which meant people  _ were _ talking about it.

“It’s how they look at me. With pity. Or how they don’t even look at me. Avoid me. Like it’s contagious.”

“Jyn, we’re all at war, everyone understands. It makes you look brave.”

“Whenever I see it, I see them. What I lost. I have to wear that on my face.  _ I hate what it’s done to me.” _

There was a footstep, too close to even signal to hide because it was right there. Jyn couldn’t do anything about the tears on her face. 

“Perhaps you should escort Agent Erso to her bunk for some rest, Sergeant Rook.”

Jyn’s voice was lost. 

He’d heard her. And that was all he had to say. 

Anger invaded pain, like flood storms were opening up inside her. 

Bodhi stood quickly, drawing to the edge of the crate that kept Cassian hidden from them. 

“It’s a little too late for the concern, Captain.”

If she saw him, it would be so much worse. Jyn slipped backwards, silently, like the child hiding at the end of the tunnel. There were some things that would never leave her. 

She could hear them argue, broken up by the faintest noise of them noticing she was gone. By then she was out of the bay, soundlessly moving back to her room.

She didn’t see Cassian push past Bodhi to look for her. She didn’t know that when the same nurse who fetched Bodhi arrived at his door an hour after they parted ways, he’d sprinted there to find her. 

_ “There’s something wrong with Agent Erso, she’s in the cargo bay. I’d heard you were with her on the Scarif Mission, when she got injured. Maybe you should go check on her?” _

Jyn didn’t know he hadn’t asked a single question before running off to find her.

She didn’t know after she was gone, he went back to his quarters and the dreams were even worse. 

She wasn’t there.

 

Someone did say something, weeks later. In the training room. Whispered intently in her ear as she was pinned to the mat. Cassian was leading her training session, wouldn’t look at her. Commented on poor footing and her obvious distraction in a detached tone. With other recruits, he would round closer, guide them side by side. Usually touched arms, spines, or legs to place and support. He was a good teacher, offering proper guidance. 

He never went near her. She felt loathing simmer through him every time she was near. 

She didn’t care. She didn’t have to try. Her attitude and bitterness rotted inside her and her expression was perpetually sour. Cassian almost seemed sensible to be unable to look.

She was terrible the days he was leading sessions. She learned a lot, infuriatingly, but practicing it was a nightmare. Didn’t he already find enough things that were wrong with her?

Face-first in the mat, burning with shame, the voice of a too-young-for-war boy echoed in her ear, “I heard you were pretty before.”

Jyn went limp, like her neck had been snapped. It felt like that. She couldn’t move, couldn’t fight the hold anymore. It was agony, and there was no physical pain to distract from how every sense of strength vacated her body in that moment.

Before. 

“Get off of her.”

She heard boots across the mat, sprinting towards her. Everyone had been paired off and Cassian made the usual rounds. His back had been turned. There was no way of knowing about her internal surrender. He only saw her body drop.

The body above hers seemed to tear away with a rough jerk. She saw the boy land, shell-shocked, next to her, Cassian’s hand landed on her lower back, then the back of her head. Smoothing the hair matted there, like it was the only place she could feel. 

“Did you hurt her?”

She saw that stupid little boy scoot away, distancing himself from what could have been a corpse. Cassian’s hands ran over her, checking for damage. She was too numb to even flinch. 

“It was a joke, it was just a joke.”

_ “What did you do?” _

Jyn closed her eyes. He thought her neck was broken. He wasn’t trying to move her because he thought she was injured. He thought some dumb recruit had wasted a perfectly good soldier.

He was angry because she was wasted of her final purpose to him. 

She pushed up off the mat, shaking out her hands when she settled back on her knees. Cassian’s body lost its tension for only a second before wiring back up again. He grabbed her wrist. His eyes told her she needed to explain herself. She stood up, he followed. Didn’t let go. 

She extracted her wrist, covering her eyes with her hair. She rubbed her shoulder under the line of her shirt, which had been twisted severely under Lisbon’s pin. She didn’t even know that when it was happening. 

“It was nothing, Captain. I left my sense of humor in my room, apparently. Lisbon, let’s just keep going.”

The boy, Lisbon, stared up at her. He was so young. This was so much for everyone. It was war. She couldn’t even fault him trying to twist a knife. The rebellion had made sadists of much better men. 

“What did he say to you?”

She could feel his anger, but she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.  _ It’s alright,” _ she added, not to Cassian though. It was to the petrified child in front of her. Instead she reached out a hand to Lisbon, still cowed on the mat. He really did look terrified.

“I’m vainer than I realized,” she said with a weak smile, clapping him on the arm when he pulled himself up with her help. Lisbon’s eyes stayed on the mat. Great, now  _ no one _ could look at her. 

She would prove she would be okay. This was her one slip up, and it could never happen again.

She tried to glance confidently at Cassian, to prove it. His face was a ruptured mask, unleashed rage like an oil spill filling the room.

He figured it out. It didn’t take a genius. Her face. The wedge between them.

What she couldn’t understand is why he was so  _ angry  _ about it. 

“Since when hasn’t there been some dirty talk between sparring partners?” she joked, but it was hollow. The slip in meanings made Cassian’s nostrils flare. Lisbon flushed. 

The captain straightened his shoulders. His back was ramrod straight. He was being very professional about an incredibly unprofessional lapse in judgement. 

“I want to know what he said.”

A dismissive hand waved between them. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need repeating,” she felt Cassian’s breath hiss out of his lungs, like he was deflating. It was soundless, but she felt it. “You’re right, I get too distracted by unimportant details,” she hedged, trying to get Cassian to step back.

“I think you should sit this session out, Jyn.”

“I want to stay,” her voice came out sharp and severe,  _ “I want to work.” _

“Jyn, I would feel best about this whole situation if you sat this one out. I’ll reassign partners next session.”

“Well this isn’t about  _ how you feel.” _

The implications of this statement were not lost on a single person in the room, no matter how oblivious. Cassian’s expression was stricken, probably for being associated with the likes of her and her emotions.

Cassian looked at her, and it didn’t fix a thing. She thought she would live again with those eyes on her. But they were on her with the tight, tense anger of the man who barely knew her. 

“You’re dismissed, Agent.”

“Don’t punish me for this. I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did. I’m learning. It’s a violation of power to send me away for making a mistake.”

“I shouldn’t have said it,” Lisbon blurted out, “I’ll go.”

“You are staying right here,” Cassian snapped at him. His hand curled around Jyn’s elbow. He half-dragged her towards the door.

“I’m handling it,” he mumbled. He didn’t sound confident in that statement at all. Jyn wrenched herself free, manipulating the pull of his body to keep walking away when he tried to keep her close. He stumbled back. Her feet moved on without him. 

“That’s reassuring,” she spat back at him. 

She knew he was going to punish her for letting some words get to her. She knew he was angry, and her face was the problem, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Jyn thought she knew a lot of things. She didn’t know Cassian kept Lisbon in the training gym after everyone else left and made him run laps until he vomited. She didn’t know Cassian asked him what he had said to her. 

Between retching, Lisbon admitted the words that made Jyn drop like dead weight. 

Once the recruit’s stomach emptied, Cassian put a hand on his shoulder, helping him stand upright. His fist drove into Lisbon’s gut. He left him there to cough and gasp with nothing more than an order to clean up his own mess, and to stay far away from Jyn Erso.

 

Jyn was assigned a new schedule of practice times, where she would see neither Lisbon or Cassian. She knew for whose benefit that  _ really _ was. 

She declined being apart of daily training, testing out with a separate instructor. She hadn’t officially recruited, so there wasn’t much they could make her do. Mon Mothma took the request with thin lips, withholding a loaded opinion. Jyn didn’t feel like asking what was on her mind. She never was the type for that. 

Jyn had taken to wearing her headscarf as a daily practice. With that and the patch over her eye, the scars were more mysterious. It made it easier for others to be around her. It made her life easier to feel like she was being covered. 

It was that or waste away in her room like everyone expected. So Cassian didn’t want her now that she was disfigured. Maybe he’d never even wanted her in the first place, if this was who he was.

Still, rage coiled through her at her reassignment. Bodhi had always insisted to her that anyone who cared about the disfigurements wasn’t worth it. She loved him for his tolerance and his calm, but she’d had enough. She was tired of not standing up for herself. 

The day she found out about her new practice schedule, she chased down Cassian. She followed him halfway across base to an empty hallway. He was so focused on avoiding her he didn’t notice she was specifically following him. 

The minute they were alone enough to buy her some time, she shoved him up against the wall. 

He flinched, but made no move to defend himself. She respected him less for not fighting. He was a better soldier than that.

Her forearm banded across his throat. 

“Why,” she grit out, “did you think you needed to interfere?”

He swallowed, his adam’s apple shifting under her skin. He kept staring at the scarf draped around her face. 

“Because I didn’t want to put you in that position again.”

She had a look that said she was close to spitting in his face. “Such a martyr. Do you think he’s the first, or last, person to say something about how I look? That Imperial allies are going to take the high road when they see me? People on the streets who have no consequences throwing comments at a tiny thing like me? Do you think this is something I can be shielded from?  _ That I even need to be?” _

He stuttered for the right thing to say. “I-I...” He shut his mouth, lifting a defiant jaw. “I was trying to do my job. And clearly, you aren’t as fine with it as you say, if an idiot like Lisbon can make you drop like that.”

She gritted her teeth in a snarl she hadn’t had to use in a long time. 

“I know how you feel about my face, it’s beginning to rub off on me when you’re around. Good thing you keep yourself scarce.”

He looked stricken. “You shrink from me every time you see me.”

“You always look so angry at me, I’m waiting for you to bite.”

He closed his eyes. She wished she could stop always knowing what he was trying, or pointedly not trying, to see when it came to her. 

“I deserve it. If I could go back Jyn, I would,  _ I should have _ protected you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You shielded me. If you hadn’t, it would have been me.  _ It should have been.” _

She blanched at him, her one uncovered eye wild with a crazed shock. If she thought she was angry at him before, she was ready to murder him the minute he started explaining himself.

“I was as good as dead anyway,” she sputtered, “Do you think I’m going to hold you to that?”

“That’s not the point, I should have had hope. I could have shielded you.”

He looked like he was talking to a ghost. Like she wasn’t even there. Like she died on that beach. He was already defeated. He already resigned himself to losing her.

“If you’re the one with regrets, why are you punishing me?”

He shook his head, tilting his face down as close as possible to hers. 

“I’m not going to be selfish with you anymore, Jyn. You deserve better.”

“Selfish? That’s all you’ve got?  _ That’s _ all you’ve done wrong?”

“I was trying…”

To fix it. To make it better. To deprive himself of the guilt. To pretend it never happened.

“The only thing you did was leave,” she spat at him. 

“I didn’t want to leave you, I just-”

_ “You left.” _

He grabbed her face in his hands, his breath coming out as a shudder. Maybe a sob. His brow pressed tenderly to hers. They were so close. He was a blur before her. Maybe that’s why he chose to hold her like this. 

_ “Jyn,” _ he sounded so mournful,  _ “I ruined your life.” _

He thought she was ruined. It was like the second blast of the explosion.  

She shoved him back, and she was even angrier that he had the nerve to look shocked and hurt to be pushed away. 

“I never felt that way until you treated me like I was  _ nothing.” _

He jolted forward, she pushed him back again. 

“That’s not what I-”

Another rough shove. 

“You clearly need to work on forgiving yourself.”

“I know it’s too much to ask for your forgiveness, Jyn, but I’m so sorry I couldn’t-”

“You don’t need my forgiveness for that. You have it. You never had a grudge from me to begin with. But how you have acted these past few months…”

She looked ready to hit him. He looked like he wanted her to. 

“You don’t deserve my time. You aren’t the person I thought you were anymore. Maybe if you forgive yourself, and get over whatever’s holding you back, he’ll come back. Maybe he never existed. I don’t care. Don’t make it my problem.”

She left, and for once, did not feel so small. 

She didn’t see him in the hallway, standing against the wall for a long time after she left. She never saw how he didn't speak to anyone he sat next to at meals, watching her laugh with Bodhi. She didn't know he spent every day wishing he could ease her pain into himself, causing each of them twice as much in the process. 

He vowed when he started breathing normally, he would resume his day. It took longer than expected.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Jyn tamped down any residual feelings after their fight. She went on. She let it go. She’d had enough. 

She didn’t tell Bodhi what happened, he mildly observed over dinner a few weeks later that she seemed better. Calmer. She shrugged impassively, but when he kept looking at her she broke into a smile and took his hand across the table. 

“Some of the new recruits were whispering about how I lost my eye. I snuck up and told them it was plucked out by a bounty hunter as a prize for the one who ordered the hit on me.”

“And you’re still alive in this story because…?”

“He plucked out the eye before he killed me, so I killed him and took both his eyes. Then I ate them, to steal his strength.”

Bodhi laughed, a shy kind of snort, which he covered in one hand. She made him laugh despite not wanting to. She was getting better at joking.

“You still have the comm Baze and Chirrut left you?”

She tilted stared at her hands, nervous. She hadn’t used it. “Yeah. I haven’t...reaching out has always been hard for me, you know?”

“Sometimes people disappoint you,” Bodhi said, with a heavy meaning. Jyn tried not to let her face crumple. “However, I talked to them last week, and they would love to hear from you. Maybe tell them that story, I’m sure Chirrut would love it.”

Her mouth twisted like it always did when she was unsure. 

That night, tentatively curled up in bed, she pressed the comm to her pillow, speaking into it quietly. The monk and his protector answered immediately, crowing for her to tell them how she’d been. She smiled against her pillowcase and told them the revised story of how the Great Jyn Erso lost her eye.

They loved it. 

 

Cassian hated seeing her. He loved seeing her, because she was alive, breathing and talking and fighting alongside him. But he hated seeing her; the defeated slouch to her shoulders, the caged posture, the way her head was always tilted down. She dove into his war regardless of consequences, prepared to die. But she didn’t die. She just got consequences. 

Having destroyed whatever it was between them over a fifty-fifty chance, like who’s head was blocking the other from the explosion on Scarif, made sense when she was at a distance. Those agonizing days in the medbay, when they worked on his leg, Bodhi broke the news when they stopped by before Jyn woke up;  _ She lost an eye. She’s still our Jyn, but she has some healing to do.  _

He pitied her, but he pictured the wound as a forever-closed lid. Lost an eye. Like it popped out and rolled away. A single seam across an untouched face.

When he saw her again, the scar tissue, the rough nose, the self-conscious posture, a void opened in him that couldn’t close. The guilt overwhelmed the capacity to care about anything outside the destruction of Jyn Erso. 

He had been wrong about that, of course, but she wasn’t there to tell him that until it was too late. The distance made him irrational. Had he been able to, with his leg, go see her instantly, she’d probably razor through him with her clarity and wit until they were both laughing at themselves. 

This was his fault, and he didn’t know how to remedy it except for distance. 

Mon Mothma called for a private meeting with him after he’d turned down her first offer to make Rogue One a functional special force. 

“That mission just seemed like you couldn’t tear that dynamic apart, it was too effective to waste” she reasoned, her face as composed as ever. 

He shifted in his perfect soldier stance. She’d told him “at ease” about five times, but he couldn’t make himself comply. 

“This is how I’m most comfortable,” he admitted finally, after her annoyance was showing. It was how he remembered who he was. 

She nodded once, a little stunned. 

“I still can’t help but feel we’re wasting a valuable asset. What you and Agent Erso accomplished in those last hours was what turned the war in our favor, and to have survived it…”

The only break in his perfect Captain’s stance was his eyes falling to the floor. 

Mon Mothma’s quiet, reserved calm won out. “I suppose this is something I’m pushing you into. I’ve given you my opinion. Should you find that this is something worth pursuing, let me know. You may be depriving a means to a faster end to this war.”

Cassian barely tolerated the request enough to nod in response. He excused himself in his professional, clipped manner. 

For once, the rebellion asked something of him that he could not give. 

 

Jyn’s day-to-day got easier. The patch and headscarf melted into her features, and they became a constant almost as quickly for her as they did everyone else. When she’d first draped the fabric over the side of her face and mouth, people would double-take at her when she entered the room, now, it was just a part of her, one they recognized as much as her messy hair and scowl. Veiled in a pale gray, slate blue, or a sage green when she was feeling feisty. She once tried red but that struck everyone as too patriotic for her, Bodhi whistling at her about representing the rebellion. 

The red looked beautiful against her hair, a detail Jyn missed but Cassian, with a lump in his throat across the dining hall, certainly did not. 

The teasing started tentatively, growing stronger alongside her own returning strength. Once, an abrupt Kes Dameron thought to unite an-otherwise silent table (a mission failed, a body count leaving no lone unaffected by the deaths) by requesting Jyn tell the story. The stuff of legends. 

“Well, Erso, I have never seen a more downtrodden group of ragtag rebels in all my life. Why don’t you tell us the story of how you lost your eye?”

Only Kes Dameron could pull it off, with the gruffness, class and authority to make her nudge back. 

“Bounty hunter or eaten by a hutt?” she suggested wryly, and she was very pleased to see some recruits wilted a bit to learn that the story she told them was fake. Enough people on base knew what really happened, but even they perked up as she lifted herself to sit on the tabletop, levels above them on the benches. 

Kes, who led a few informal missions she had been crewed on, nodded in agreement. She hadn’t noticed he’d paid her any attention. He was a competent leader, but brusque and official about it. But clearly he had heard her rewrite the story, semi-threatening, in several versions that made her some kind of serial adventurer. 

She wasn’t going to be ruined by this. She wasn’t. She was still an effective soldier. She could do that without love...and she had her team, minus one. She’d lived most of her life with less than that. 

“Few people can double-cross a hutt and live…” she began theatrically. Bodhi was beaming at her. He placed a hand on her boot. She nudged back, breaking character to smile at him.

Cassian, seated at the far end of the table, got up and walked out of the room. It was too much for him. 

It would not be too much for her. Not anymore.  

She stopped looking for the same person on the other side of the mirror. That Jyn wasn’t there anymore. 

Cassian was still searching for her, and she almost felt sorry for him. The headscarf was a jarring thing for him to see, her face blocked off to him. She could have been anyone under there. He’d almost flinch, as if realizing,  _ oh, that’s who she is now.  _

She didn’t have the energy to be angry about it anymore. 

With a special request placed with unflinching urgency, she and Bodhi got assigned their first mission together, with a small crew. Kes Dameron was the one who signed off on the request. 

 

Jyn’s stories haunted Cassian; the ghost of his mistake transmuted into a murderer or monster. One week it was mauled out by a gundark. The next it was sold in exchange for information to a bloodthirsty gang of wookies. The stories became pieces of her mystery as she grew out of the person he knew. 

It hurt to hear them, in reality, he had done the mauling, he was the bloodthirsty one. 

They were everywhere, the rumors. The mix of pity and appreciation for her turnaround. How they weren’t sure she was going to make it. 

He saw it, sometimes, the defeated slump to her shoulders as she geared up. The eye that lingered too long on a reflective surface. Assessing, dissatisfied. 

If he had been a smarter man, he could now creep up behind, press a kiss to her one soft cheek and wrap his arms around her waist. Learn how her hair smelled when her neck arched over his shoulder. Know the sounds she made when his lips trailed down her skin. 

The longing was a guilty one, because it wasn’t deserved. Shame coiled through him every time the impulse arose. 

Jyn, straddling a bench with strong thighs, looking like a queen in fatigues. Her eye caught his gaze, face composed and challenging. Daring him to do the things he didn’t dare do. 

Jyn, doing a cool-down in the practice room when he went to train alone, her sweaty body pushing itself up off the floor with a deep breath. Her headscarf was off. Sweaty hair matted against the scars. When his weight sent a pulse through the mat he stepped on, the one she occupied, she lifted herself, grabbing for it to wind around her shoulders and hair. 

Jyn, and imagining her holding him. Holding him. 

Holding him. 

The memory of her body pressed to his was forever tainted by the impending blast. He remembered being knocked over, before the burn was even happening. She held fast to him. Then, a rough rip upwards. Up into the sky. Watching the clouds of fire get smaller and smaller.  

The new leg ached every time he walked away from her. 

 

Jyn returned with a bandaged-up knife wound and a breathless sense of relief. It hadn’t gone perfectly, but it had been successful, and she and Bodhi worked just as well as two, instead of six. Kes Dameron clapped her on the back upon her return. He was proud. She was so used to being treated like glass, with her eye. He remembered she wasn’t delicate. 

The debrief was a tense one, Cassian shooting daggers at the remainder of the crew as the stab was documented. 

“I would have been more careful with my team,” he hissed, his voice like ice. He was obviously upset. Jyn was cool, collected: “I understand that Jyn’s injuries have become somewhat of a laughing matter on base, but I don’t exactly find them at all funny.”

Jyn flinched, a reaction he had tried to inflict in someone, but not her.

He pulled himself back, his shoulders no longer surging his whole body forward as he berated the troops. 

“Be careful with your fellow teammates,” he said numbly, his eyes flickering to Jyn’s face She met his gaze, jaw tight. “You will never know anyone as well as you do in the ones you work with in the rebellion. You don’t know what part of yourself you are losing until it’s gone. Look out for each other.”

Jyn broke their contact first, her shoulders sagging, her breath in short, angry bursts. 

_ You know it’s you. _ He wanted to curl her up in those words like a blanket.  _ You know it is. _

 

Jyn cornered him when he exited the bar that night. He wondered how she found him. The smell of alcohol on her clued him in she had been closer than he thought. 

“Uncalled for, arrogant, invasive, maybe you should keep some things to yourself-”

He only saw one drunk, flushed cheek, and one angry, flashing eye. The rest was veiled. 

“If you can’t take criticism, you are in the wrong place. That’s why there are debriefs. So you learn from your mistakes. Not all of your missions will be celebrated.”

“And what have you ever learned?” she was in his face, teeth clenched. 

He drew back. His balance was off. The leg was still a lot to get used to, especially when drunk. 

“Not to take things so personally.”

“You, Cassian Andor, are a master of detachment,” she agreed, scoffing, tilting her head back in disbelief that he could be so calm. 

He stepped forward, needing something to grab onto for balance. But he curled a hand around her waist, fingers slipped through a belt loop, disguising the need to lean on her a moment. She reeled back in disgust. He tried to tamp down that seeing that gutted him. 

“You’d be surprised how useful detachment can be,” he leaned his face close to hers, “You can give everything, and nothing will be taken away.”

His whisper near her mouth was so intimate. Maybe it wouldn’t be the way he wanted her, but he’d take anything, anything...

She drew even closer. He’d underestimated her again. He didn’t know how badly he’d pay now. 

“That’s only how it feels like until it’s all gone, Cassian. Then you have nothing.”

She knew that. She knew that long before she met him. 

She stepped back. He swayed on his feet. When her punch to his jaw came, he was grateful, he could blame the ensuing fall on that. 

 

Strategically, Mon Mothma assigned a mission of just her and Cassian and a small crew. Her punching him a week before had been unreported, and by that standard, unrecognized as an issue.  _ Lead by example in looking out for your team,  _ she suggested airily.  _ Like you said. _

Grimly, he fantasized about telling Mothma just how much her alleged great asset was also her most temperamental one. 

Jyn’s heart sank when she read the roster. Bodhi swapped out for Cassian. Punishment, she was sure, for her previous mission.

Cassian geared up methodically. It was strange, to be close to him in a non-transient or official state. Brushing past him in a hallway. Ignoring him in a meeting. She watched his hands knot his boots with such tough precision her heart almost tugged for him. The man could not be careless with even his shoes. 

She often wondered, before their first argument, if he would come forward with an excuse that made the months of agony better. A perfect, enclosed reason for grief placed gently in the palm of her hand. When his excuses flew, falling limply at her feet from their lack of strength, she no longer hoped for that. While it was never carelessness that made him behave a certain way, it wasn’t all nobility either. 

His eyes watched her very carefully when she geared up in the ship, made suggestions to their team, managed a laugh when someone slapped a hand over their eye in horror when she made a gruff correction, with an exaggerated gasp _ -don’t take it- _

He saw the strange face she made when the laugh ended, because it was a reflex, and he could tell there were darker thoughts churning about the nature of the joke she brought on herself. 

She was so distracted that she even took the seat next to him, her eye flicking from angle to angle and her expression faraway. 

Tentatively, he reached out his hand. An offering. An excuse to feel her skin against his. His mind went to the dirtiest and purest places at the same time in everything involving her. He wanted her smile. He wanted her screaming with his cock inside her. 

She didn’t even look at it. He wiped a pretend spot of dirt off a piece of equipment halfway between them and pretended he didn’t care. 

 

Cassian was brought back to her, a mess of blood and cursing.

“I’m fine,” he waved her off. She was already so far away, that she turned her back and dug through the medkit for bacta patches, she seemed to float out into another orbit. She seemed frustrated to have to be so close to him, to nurse the blaster burn at his side.

“You’d say that with a laser blast right between the eyes.”

“If I whined all the time, you wouldn’t like me so much.”

Her brow raised infinitesimally. He must have lost more blood than she initially thought.

“I’d like you more with a laser blast right between the eyes.”

“How I missed our talks,” he sighed, grunting as disinfectant tore through his nerves. She looked away, talking to someone else. He was jealous of them; greedy for her. 

“I think there’s more than the blaster burn,” she said to whoever was there, fear creeping across her face. 

“I’m fine,” he said again, “go find Whit, he’s still out there.”

Jyn’s face went pale. She finally brought herself to his side. 

“Cassian,” she said, her voice grave, “Whit’s been standing right next to me the whole time.”

“Captain?” he heard Whit’s voice, but didn’t turn to look for him. As he faded away, he didn’t want to waste a moment. His eyes locked on Jyn. 

 

Jyn, not having the clearance or personal connection to Cassian to be in the know of how he was doing, was stuck. 

Bodhi could potentially  feed her what little information he could get, but he didn’t really have much more of those things that she did. Also, that meant she had to ask him. Which meant expressing concern over Cassian. 

It was a nerve-wracking few hours until their debrief; one scheduled without a captain. Mon Mothma was gracious but official. Jyn was grateful when Whit asked how their captain was fairing. 

“He’ll pull through,” was Mothma’s reserved response. 

Jyn kept herself together until she made it back to her quarters. She had given him the space she thought he needed in the hail of fire. She didn’t have his back. She took responsibility in the meeting, sighting her assumption that Cassian Andor could handle anything and she’d just be in the way. It was only a little bit of a detour from the truth. 

She ripped the scarf off her face, which had begun to itch more every day. 

_ All that worry for nothing. Why is it always a lot of worry for nothing with him? _

There was a knock of metal against metal. K2 was at her door, his unmoving face a hopeless indicator for what was wrong. 

“Cassian requested your presence.”

She leaned against her doorframe, arms crossed over her chest. It was too late at night for any good to come of it. 

“Did he?”

“He has taken the required dosage of pain medication suited to his injuries. His intoxication levels are high. Very high. He said your name when he was brought back to his bunk.”

Jyn rolled her eyes. “And why would I be required.”

She swore she could see judgement in his mechanical eyes. She caught herself feeling, in spite of everything, a flare of respect in the droid. She remembered his sacrifice for Cassian, the surprise when Cassian was able to reprogram the same messy configuration onto another stolen droid. He just appeared one day, criticizing Jyn, but no one felt like laughing because of the gouge across her face. 

K2 was proving himself more loyal than anyone else in Rogue One.

“Cassian needs you.” 

Jyn didn’t bother to argue. 

She found him, a mess on his bed. He hadn’t bothered to undress, K2 lacked the dexterity to remove articles of clothing without breaking a few bones. She sat on the foot of his bed and went for his boots; a safe option. Still tied precisely as he had that morning. 

She got caught up looking at the lines in the corners of his eyes. She yanked to roughly on a boot. 

He started awake, nearly kicking her in the face. She held him steady, a seasoned block preventing disaster. 

Her hands flexed around the ankle she held. 

She saw it when he blacked out on the ship, they pushed his pant leg up. The mechanical leg. She knew from touching him on Scarif, their last moments, he didn’t have that before. This was from the injuries sustained on that mission. 

They had to take his leg and he never told her. 

“Jyn?”

She removed her hands from him. 

“Yes?”

Cassian sat up. He turned away from her, hands balled in fists on his lap. Like he was physically holding in the drugged impulse to touch. He looked bleary, sleepy; she was jealous of whatever they gave him, she’d only seen looks like that outside of Cantinas on Tatooine. 

“Why do you joke about your eye?”

She closed her eyes, one seeing and one blind. His voice was vulnerable. 

“Because I want to seem strong,” she admitted, sighing. He probably wouldn’t even remember this conversation.

“You are. You’re the strongest person I know.”

“Likewise,” she said with a labored laugh. She didn’t need this. Didn’t need to remember why she adored him.

“Does it hurt still?” Cassian wanted to know next. 

Jyn sighed, pressing her brow to the space between his shoulderblades. She felt him breathe. The smell was achingly familiar. He sighed at the contact. 

“My face...?”

_ Or you? _

“Yes.”

“It gets easier, some days. My face. I’m getting used to it. Getting out of bed was hard, in the beginning. I was never pretty, but…”

He let out a moan of disagreement; a weak, drunken sound. It was almost childish, like he was five and she held him on her lap and playfully suggested she shave his head.  _ No, no,  _ **_don’t._ **

“I’m sure the rebellion taught you there were things you have to live without, Cassian.”

“I’m sure your parents taught you that you deserve better, Jyn.”

“Why do you think I’m not tailing you like a lost child?” she shot back. He hissed, covering his face in his hands. She reeled back, only having ever had to face the pain she caused very rarely in her life. A hand lifted. Placed itself on a hunched shoulder blade. 

“I loved you, you know that? The way I love Bodhi. And Chirrut and Baze. But in other ways too, the way I don’t love them. Because you were Cassian.”

He shook his head. He was silent, like he was scared she would take that confession away, burn into nothing in thin air. 

“I’m telling you because it’s possible for someone to give you their love.”

He reached back, grabbed her free hand. Pulled it around his body, cradled it to his chest. 

“I wanted yours.”

She almost said  _ too late, _ but that didn’t seem entirely true. 

Cassian was groaning from the sleepy weight of the drugs, and impulse won out. His arms closed in around her and wrestled her to lie next to him. She lay there, contemplating a way out. He was healing. This probably wasn’t the best time to punch him again.

Her body remembered his. They pressed together unself-consciously. His breath was warm and soft against her ear. She pulled at the ends of her headscarf, which was choking her. It released from her neck, only shrouding her loosely. She was glad his eyes were closed, glad he was close; as long as he wouldn’t remember this. 

_ So it would be like this. _ She told herself.  _ Now you know.  _

She’d leave in five minutes. Sneak out as soon as he fell asleep. Ten, to make sure he was really out. Fifteen, because he might wake up again…

 

“Jyn?”

Jyn stirred, lifted her head. She looked down to what it rested on. His chest. His arms were still around her, loose and tentative. Hands on her lower back where it felt natural to be there. His thigh was wedged between hers, her grip on him obvious. He reached a hand towards her to brush some of the hair out of her face. 

_ No.  _

She whipped her body off of his, stumbled across the room. Her knee caught the edge of his desk chair, a terrible whack, and she nearly keeled over from it. Cassian reached for her, off balance and aching without the dosage of whatever it was that got him there. She pushed him back by the shoulder, gently, to make sure he didn’t fall off the bed. 

His hands settled on her hips. She jerked under his touch, but he was clinging in a way separate from his forced, calm expression. She wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it. 

“Jyn, what we talked about-”

“A mistake,” she blurted out. She didn’t want to talk about it. It was so much harder, knowing what she was missing felt like.

“I…” he looked up at her, a strange, vulnerable confusion she had never seen on him before.

She pulled herself away. She’d had control last night, his limbs sleepy and nuzzling, longing distracting from where they really were. She could say things that were hard to say, just to have them fade from his memory. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, even though he’d never said it to her.

He resumed a posture she recognized. Back straight, arms folded, eyes assessing.

“What do we do now?” his voice didn’t match that posture just yet. 

“We don't talk about it. We work together. We let it go. It'll only hurt to hold on to.”

“I don’t want to-” he never finished what was clearly only half a thought, because Jyn saw her scarf tangled in his sheets. She made a panicked noise, ripping it towards herself and draping it messily across her head. 

Cassian was still, a little stunned. 

“Jyn, it’s alright,” he placed a hand on her arm.  _ “It’s alright.” _

His voice got softer, lower. He tried to bring her closer to him. It wasn’t fair of him to want these things now. It wasn’t fair that she had to wear her damage on her face, but he could dress his and walk around like nothing changed. 

“I’m sorry I failed you during that mission,” she blurted out, and grew angry because she was still,  _ still, _ waiting on the apology from him for ruining everything. “It won’t happen again.”

“Jyn, it was my fault,” she pulled herself from his grasp again.

“It’s fine,” she waved a hand dismissively. “I just want us to be able to work together without all…. _ this.” _

_ This _ hit heavy, because in his mind, Casian knew  _ he _ was this. This mess. This problem. This pain. 

“We can do that. I know we can.”

He was emphatic, she just wanted to leave. Could they ever feel the same thing at the same time? She made muttered excuses, veiling herself in the scarf more than necessary. It halved her face. The room was like a tomb after she exited it. 

_ This _ is what he deserved.

 

At the first indication he was well enough to return to active duty, Cassian sent a request to meet privately with Mon Mothma. He was earlier than her, which everyone in the rebellion, the Council included, previously found impossible. 

His stance was as rigid as ever, this time surging with pride and purpose. 

“I’ve found something worth pursuing,” he announced. 

 

Jyn got the call in early morning, a vague invitation for an audience with Mon Mothma and the rest of the council. She assumed it was going to be a sit-down about her most outrageous version of The Eye story, involving Draven, a dress, and the required insurance to keep Jyn quiet about what she saw. 

Jyn drummed her fingernails on the surface of the table as she waited. The clicking soothed her and annoyed everyone else around her, which in her mind was a fair trade. 

“We have a very specific mission for you. Long-term undercover. It’s quite a bit more than we’ve ever asked of you, so the compensation will be higher.”

Jyn raised her eyebrows. 

“Compensation? I haven’t heard much of that going around.”

“Well, because of the nature of this mission, for your own safety, it would be best to undergo reconstructive surgery to protect your identity afterwards. We can acquire the means to repair your eye and…”

The rest of her face.

Jyn’s eye flashed greedily. A new face meant she could start over. Not have to explain what happened to her anymore. Get some distance from Scarif.

K2 had listed the options, they were possible scientifically. They were just more than she could afford.

“What’s the catch?”

“The mission,” Mon Mothma replied, her face grim. 

Jyn pursed her lips, considering. “When is it?”

“It’s hard to say. The council can wait about three days for an answer. You could be summoned to leave at anytime after that.”

“What’s my cover?” 

“You will be briefed on your cover when and if you accept.”

Jyn’s face was a twist of conflicting emotions. She could be free from this, but it seemed too easy. A new face should have been an automatic yes, but it somehow felt bitter on her senses. 

“Why me?” she asked finally, glancing around at the council. There was a roomful of uncomfortable fidgeting. “Why not someone better trained, who didn’t need a new face?”

“There are aspects of your background that are favorable. You were raised in the early parts of your life as a high-ranking Imperial Officer’s daughter.”

Jyn’s hackles went up. This answer was vague and unconvincing, one K2 would not accept lightly if he was there. 

“That seems like something that can be taught to someone with two eyes.”

Mon Mothma’s face was as clinical as ever. “Your cover is currently being held by the rebellion. We’d plan on sending you back in her place, claiming you sustained the disfigurements under rebel torture.”

Jyn’s breath deflated out of her nose. “I’m not the only one with scars.”

The council was already brushing themselves of, lifting out of seats to leave. “You have three days to give your answer. Let it be known this is a highly delicate, classified mission. You’ve been warned.”

“Once again, why does it get offered to someone with my history?”

“You were selected as a partner for one already assigned on this mission. Captain Andor requested you specifically.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know I'm ignoring what has to be well developed canon on Kes Dameron, but to me, he will always be a gruffer version of Oscar Isaac with slightly more gray hair. At every stage of his life. I actually may or may not have based him off my favorite english teacher. you don't know my life.
> 
> I have gotten more requests for Cassian to get punched than any other requests for anything, ever. But no one said Jyn should do it, it was aways one of the boys, which I found funny. 
> 
> Send me prompts on Tumblr! No one sends me prompts there! I'm such a weird hermit witch in this fandom. I want to bang out little stuff during breaks between chapters.


	3. Chapter 3

“I’d like to know more about the nature of this assignment before I go any further,” Jyn blurted out. The council shot her incredulous looks. She clenched her fists, remaining in her seat. She stared at her hands. “I don’t need objectives. I need to know what I’m getting into and potential risks. I’ve put my body through enough, and as much as I want the repairs, I’m not doubling down on what got me here in the first place.”

Mon Mothma was as perfectly still as ever. She merely tilted her head to the side, with the council frozen halfway out the door to begin with; hands clutching clasps of bags, partially-risen from seats. 

“I’d like a word alone with Agent Erso.”

The room was emptied like a exhale deflating a lung. 

Jyn remained seated, reminiscent of that sulking, disconnected girl being bullied into going after Saw Guerrera. She felt helplessly in the middle of things once again, and from the look on Mon Mothma’s face as she settled into a chair next to Jyn, seemingly human for once, she wasn’t wrong to white-knuckle her freedom. 

“You would be working alongside Cassian Andor as this Imperial Officer’s daughter and her husband...”

Jyn grimaced. That bastard.

“Cassian Andor would be at the most risk from this mission, because his identity is entirely fabricated.”

“I think a decent, passing impersonation would put me more at risk.”

“But you have more to gain.”

Jyn’s eyes flickered around the room until those words were uttered. Then her eye was locked in some faraway place, her nostrils flaring. 

“Then, yes,” her voice was very quiet and small. “My answer is yes.”

Mothma’s eyes flickered for a moment. “I’m not submitting your answer until the end of the time I gave you. Inform me if you’ve changed your mind within three days.”

There was a tone to her voice, like she really hoped Jyn would.  

Jyn nodded, numb. She just wanted to move forward from the point, the place where pain like this was still easily access. 

“Three days,” Mon Mothma said, with the clinical patience of a nurse. Jyn removed herself from the room without an answer.

 

Jyn could only sit on her bed, seething, for the next hour. It was the kind of rage where she -a nearly chronic fidgeter- couldn’t move. It was like her body was locked in this channel, it thundered through her, using her, she could only stay still and let it roar. 

Cassian made plans to fix her. Behind her back. 

It took tens of minutes of internal convincing to finally stand up, even more to pace, and more still to throw off her stuffy jacket and kick the small dresser containing a patchwork of a borrowed wardrobe. Nothing in this room was actually hers. Her arms and legs gained momentum, swinging, pacing, stripping down to her undershirt as breathing became harder and harder. Breathing pushed tears of of her eyes, so she tried to suppress it, and that just made every resisted breath more difficult than the last. 

Her door slid open. She’d heard the knock, but she had chosen to ignore it. She didn’t want to speak to anyone, even someone like Bodhi, which would have been the best case scenario. When it opened anyway, the idea of seeing anyone on the other side repulsed her twice as much, and she knew only one person who would dare barge in now. 

“Jyn?”

She didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. 

Cassian let the door shut behind him.

“Mon Mothma told me you accepted immediately.”

His hands were behind his back; a soldier’s stance. 

She didn’t face him. He stared at her contorted shoulders, slumped, her weight pressed on her hands as she leaned on her dresser. 

_ “Leave.”  _

“I had hoped we would discuss it before you accepted.”

“You had the chance to do that before you recruited me.”

“I thought you’d be…”

“Grateful?” she stared at the wall. Maybe she was. This could all end, finally. She could have her life back. But he didn’t bring the solution to her like a friend. He brought it clinical, a disinfectant without nurture. “To be be blindsided again? Like when you ripped me out of that Imperial prison and forced me to help you find Saw? Like how I got to tag along on the mission where you tried to assassinate my father? Grateful, that I’m dragged in again and I get to play house with you?”

She heard his breath falter. “Just say no, Jyn. By the time this was about to end, the first time, I thought you wanted…”

_ I thought this was your fight too. That this is the only thing we have in common anymore. The rebellion. _

“You always put me in positions where I  _ have _ to choose your option. Just call your leverage what it is. You have no faith in me to choose you otherwise. That’s why you’ve waited until now to crack this option open.”

“I wanted to help, and the opportunity-”

She shook her head. It silenced him. 

This is what he did. Gave his affection like a pilfered blaster, an allowance to distract from her imprisonment. He hadn’t known how well she could fight when he let her keep it. It was lucky she could have been trusted, because had she betrayed him, he assumed he could kill her much more easily than she could kill him. That was why he let it happen. He  _ allowed _ it. 

“And now, I can’t help but feel used because you never wanted anything from me that would have felt good to give.”

Jyn’s face crumpled, but he could only see it in how her upper body dipped for a minute. He saw her white hands on the dresser, holding herself up like it was a lifeline. 

He spoke again, careful, guarded. “I’m careful about what I ask you to do because I don’t want you to get hurt like that again.”

“All this focus on not hurting me, has it ever once crossed your mind I need help healing me?”

“That’s why...” he sighed, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “I was trying to help you. I thought it was what you wanted. A fresh start.”

It was exactly what she wanted. A fresh start. But whoring herself out to him for a new face didn’t feel like a fresh start. She’d need the scar to be covered, it was conspicuous, easy to track. But this felt like the same shit, only harder, for a reward that she would now owe him for. 

“What we talked about the other night...I know there’s no chance of that anymore. I do know that, Jyn. I ruined the trust we built, and it’s my fault, and I’m sorry. But I still care, Jyn. I still want to help.”

Cassian drew close, close enough she could feel his breath. That regretful night, asleep next to him, had reminded her body how good his felt against hers. His hand, reaching past her, found the tube of medical creme on her dresser. She’d forgotten all about it. A pile of clutter had been upset by her earlier tantrum, it had been buried under it. He held it, examining the labels, the chemicals in it. She found the whole thing way too invasive. But she wouldn’t turn to snatch it from him, uncovered as she was. 

He twisting off the cap. He hissed. The foil seal was still attached to the lip of the tube. She hadn’t used a drop. She winced as he placed it back down with a sharp thud. 

It was meant to soften the scars. They couldn’t go away, but the skin could be made less craggy, smoother, pinker. She’d ignored the advice of the med droid and tossed it aside as soon as she got assigned this room.

“You haven’t been using it?”

“No.”

_ “Jyn,” _ he reared up behind her, like he sincerely thought she was crazy  _ “Why not?” _

“I don’t need it.”

She didn’t turn around, stubborn. 

“All this talk of being unable to help you heal. I gave you distance. I tried to be kind to you, even though looking at you was like a knife in the chest over what I did wrong. I wanted to protect you. And then you don’t do the work to heal yourself.”

“I’m  _ fine,” _ she paced away, her back still to him. Her arms spread wide, gesturing around the empty room that in no way proved she was fine, “I’m a functional soldier. I follow orders. I haven’t gotten myself or anyone else killed that I wasn’t supposed to. I have fulfilled every use you could possibly have for me.”

“It’s not about  _ use,  _ I want you  _ whole, _ Jyn. That’s all I want. Even if I can’t have you, I can’t stand back and watch you pick yourself apart.”

She finally turned around. Her scarf was off her face. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he pictured it, after being hidden so long. It was nothing, really, nothing. 

All this pain on both of their sides over something that was really nothing.

“I am whole, Cassian. As whole as I was when I met you. This was never something that made me less.”

“You didn’t always think that way,” he shook his head, stepping closer, “you made it a joke. It’s not funny anymore. It’s an injury, Jyn. You can’t pretend it doesn’t matter. You still have to deal with it, even if you want to shrug it off.”

“Stop, Cassian, you’ve done enough.”

“No, I haven’t. I needed to be better, and I wasn’t. I’m changing that.”

“Except on your big, dangerous mission where I’m cannon fodder.”

“I. Will. Protect you.” He shot forward, hands gripping her waist. She flinched at his proximity. His hands slid around her back. “Unless you  _ don’t _ want this mission.”

She wanted what the mission could give her. She was dubious of any other chance happening. 

Freedom. She could take the repaired, anonymous face, leave Jyn Erso behind, and fly away. 

Never have to see him again. 

“Do you want this mission?” his lips were so close to hers.

She nodded. The determined set to her jaw moved a tick. 

“Not looking like that, you don’t,” his hands tightened, drawing her closer. “The council may have offered you the position, but you’ll be vetted  _ after _ you accept. If they think you can’t do this undercover, you’ll never be sent out. Here’s a tip; if you shrink from my proximity, you’re not going to convince anyone.”

“Real helpful,” she spat at him.

He ducked his head down. “I’m not letting you do this if you won’t do it right. I’m not putting you at risk.”

Her hands came to his shoulders, holding him in place, so he couldn’t get closer. She also didn’t shove him away. 

She could walk out of that room, even if it was hers. She could punch him again. Things were just starting to get bearable the way they were. She could still run away the way she was. 

Her eye found the fastener at the neck of his jacket. Focused on that shiny metal, a scratch in the gunmetal finish. Set her jaw again. Made a decision. 

She stayed. She knew what he was about to have her do. And it wouldn’t happen unless she said yes. 

Cassian swallowed thickly. “Convince me.”

She pressed her lips to his, hard, biting. The kiss they’d never had before. She could feel him holding back. The intention he wanted to breathe into her. The feeling that it had been so long for this to happen. The feeling of finally. 

But no. They were pretending. 

It would go unsaid for him, and she would have to do that same. 

Her mouth turned lush, hands fanning out and falling delicately around his shoulders, like he had surprised her with a good-morning kiss. He pulled away. “Good.”

_ “Husband,” _ she smiled with a snarl. 

“But we aren’t done.”

“Thorough as always,” she snapped, her teeth at his throat, and he shuddered at the bite to his pulse point. He lifted her by the backs of her thighs to carry her to her bed.

“Do you think there will be a moment of privacy? That we won’t be monitored every moment in our bed to prove we’re partners? Do you really know what you’re in for? You have to be very, very convincing to the council Jyn, and you’ve yet to make it through the first defense; me.”

He set her down on her bed, forcing her to look at him. Her one seeing eye was narrowed, brave; the blank one shone with hate. 

She felt so  _ relieved _ when he did that. She didn’t let herself think it felt good yet, but she felt relieved. Why not just go for it, if they were going to pretend. That they could do this. That it wouldn’t utterly destroy them. 

“Lie back,” he instructed her softly. Her hands tightened on his shoulders. 

“No.”

She pushed him off of her, sitting him on the edge of the bed and straddling his lap. 

“We’re not...having sex...like this…” he grit out as she dragged her hips back and forth.

“I like this position,  _ darling.” _

His hands were like a vice on her, locked to prevent the longing touches that were begging to be felt. 

“No, Jyn, we’re not fucking  _ here, today, _ just for you to-”

“I don’t need to, just to prove a point,” she shot back. Her hips dragged back and forth over his lap, stirring his arousal with a steady grind. Point already proven. She held his head steady and her tongue plumbed his mouth. Her fingers tangled in his hair. She felt his cock stir in his trousers, her viciousness increased, hungry for victory over him. Her body went after him like an attack. 

“Jyn…” he honestly sounded scared. 

“Have I convinced you yet that I can pretend you don’t disgust me.” 

His hand landed on her neck, curling around it, thumb caressing her trachea. She cried out. 

She flinched. 

Defeat. 

“Convince yourself first,” he looked mournfully at his hand, an offending part of himself if it made her react like that. This was a spar. He’d pinned her. Round Two. 

She pushed his jacket off of his shoulders. She could hold his back and shoulders better now, his arms had more mobility to band around her. She only had a thin undershirt and the solidness of his chest felt right. 

Right, anatomically speaking. She hadn’t been touched in awhile.  _ Not good, this wasn’t about good, it was about proving... _

He pulled her close, whispering in her ear, “Remember, I’m your husband, and you adore me.”

“This is  _ fucked,” _ she growled, taking his kiss like a lifeline. 

He spoke between the pull of her lips, words vibrating through her. 

“If there was any other way, I would have used it.”

“To fix my face or to get in my pants?”

He wrapped an arm around her hips, guiding her rough grind against him. He was so hard. The friction was going to finish him off soon, she could feel it in her blood. “Why can’t we each get something out of this?” he murmured, that wicked, take-what-I-can-get scavenger look in his eye. 

An act. She knew it when she saw it, with him. This was what he husband would be. She couldn’t stand him, longed for Cassian. Couldn’t believe it only took a second for her to miss him. 

Chills ran through her, that lying came so easy between them. It was never supposed to be that way. It’s why she liked him. 

“Where’s my husband?” she murmured in his ear, grinding down hard,  _ “convince me.” _

His lips were equally doting and soft on her, the intensity melting away to submission. 

“Relax your body,” he pleaded, “you can do it, I know you can.”

“What, get you off?”

“This mission. Anything you set your mind to. I just, I don’t know what else to give you, Jyn.”

His thumb found the scar at her cheek, looking up at her, breathless. Her hips rutted against his, he rolled his up as an answer. A moan choked out of her throat. 

“I might even miss it. I don’t know if I’d recognize you anymore without it. You’re so beautiful-”

She thought she misheard. Her mind filled in the blanks, ‘ _ you  _ **_were_ ** _ so beautiful…’ _

Her whole mind clouded. He was convincing her. 

He looked up at her, eyes so full and soft and loving, mouthing it again,  _ beautiful. _ Fear tore into those eyes, insecurity, a hand reaching up again, stroking up across her brow. 

Her hips picked up their pace, trying to get Round 2 for herself, pinning him, defeating him, taking him down a peg...

“Jyn, I need to tell you-”

Her body shuddered. Unintentionally. She didn’t see it spiralling out of control, but she’d managed to get herself off from the constant rocking motion of her hips, her body seeking the friction unconsciously. The completion she thought would come to him by force was ripped out of her hands, overtaking her. She cried out, more in fear of what was happening than anything else. It was a violent one, something taken from her that she hadn’t meant to give. Cassian held her close, trying to contain the rocking and the shaking and the terrified noises choked in her throat. His eyes were concerned.

“Jyn” he was stunned as she clung to his shoulders, hips lifted off, away. Her eyes were wide, stupified, a lump of shame swelling in her throat. “Are you okay?”

“I-” her breathing was shaky, like sobs. She looked so scared, of her body and what it had done. Ashamed for those things.  _ “No.” _

His eyes were so intent on her face, so gentle and worried, that she buried her face in his shoulder. All she could think about the scar, the things her body did without her permission. 

His collarbone was soft against her cheek. Warm. 

“Jyn, Jyn…” he soothed, rubbing her back, “it’s alright, you’re alright. It’s a biological reaction. It happens. I know you didn’t...I know. Trust me, you start to detach from it after a while.”

She leapt off of him. 

“I don’t want to be used to  _ that.” _

She shook her head ferociously. Her eye was frenzied. He got up, tried to touch her. She shrank away. 

He pulled away, sat defeatedly on the edge of her bed. 

“Jyn, I’m withdrawing both of us from this mission. It’s too delicate.”

She went back to her dresser, palms pressed to the flat surface, like how she stood when he entered. Like he was never even there. 

After a moment, she nodded. 

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Jyn. I can’t believe I’d rather be dead on a beach on Scarif than ever have you look at me like that again. I shouldn’t have made you-”

“You were protecting the rebellion,” she choked out, just trying to get him to shut up and get out. “The mission would have failed. I’m not ready.”

“I’m sorry, Jyn. I’ll never say it enough for it to mean enough. I’ll go.”

She laughed humorlessly. Tears pricked her eyes. She turned to face him. 

“I would have asked you to stay, in another life.”

He took a deep breath, standing up to leave. 

“In another life, I might have deserved it.”

Jyn took his face in her hands, her eyes so sad and mournful. It was amazing how she felt bad for him when she didn’t even feel bad for herself. She only saw herself as pitiable through his eyes. His throat nearly closed with the guilty revelation. 

“I wish I wasn’t the thing that ruined you,” she looked deeply in his eyes, a dizzying feat because she had to focus on both with just one, “I’m sorry that I became the thing you used to ruin yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a sick, sick fuck.


	4. Chapter 4

The three days passed. Jyn firmly declined the offer.

Three more days went by. Jyn saw Cassian joined at the hip to another short brunette, one who, on the second day, was outfitted with an eye patch like her own. Moll, her name was. Jyn once saw her bump into a doorway, miscalculating the space she was trying to get through. Getting used to pretending she only had one eye.

She wondered who Cassian got to replace him.

Cassian would speak intently to Moll, walls up, like he was prepping her. He was briefed on the mission, it made sense he’d take on the training for another girl. They were together constantly to keep up with the backstory, even at meals. He didn’t seem too happy about it. She was severe, Jyn had met her before and immediately tensed up by how seriously she took herself.

Sometimes his eyes would flicker to hers, intent on grasping her attention, but she would look away. Sometimes, in passing, his steps would arc closer to her, but her body would shrink away, and he would right his course as though he hadn’t gone off track to move closer.

Bodhi asked her what was going on there, catching her staring, and Jyn shook her head.

“I haven’t the faintest clue.”

Cassian was stiff on the leg she had straddled, less than a week ago. She could see it in how he walked. She thought about the weight she rested on it, forgetting about the new limb, because he hadn’t ever mentioned it to her. She was surprised, when she had seen glimpses of it, without him knowing, that he had gotten one so rudimentary when there were better models, with nerves that could regenerate. The rebellion didn't have much but she'd seen hands replaced. she was surprised there was no skin to it, all machine.

She had been careless with the defects of his body. He tried to hold her anyway. She could read it in his body now, that it had hurt him, but never once had he asked her to lift the burden from him as it was happening. She wondered how much longer he could have held it without falling apart.

He would have tried until it did.

 

Jyn sat in her room. It was quiet and still. She didn’t want it any other way.

She thought about the pain, on Scarif. She had gone so long avoiding it. The blistering skin, the smell of burnt flesh so sharp in her nose because it _was_ her nose that burning. Cassian was there. Even at its worst. Even in the roar of the oncoming fire. She could feel him, solid, the final flexes of a soon-to-be-dead limb pressed against her thigh.

“Are you scared?” she had whispered into the fire.

“I’m _relieved,”_ he murmured against her hair.

“That it’s over?”

“That you’re with me.”

She wanted to do what was right. She wanted her father to be proud.

She had also wanted _more._

Jyn had held her breath as she waited to be melted into thin air with Cassian in her arms.

She stood up, trying to escape the cloud of memories. She crossed to her dresser, uncapped the tube of burn cream. Used her fingernail to pick off the foil seal. Placed a dab on her fingertip, rubbing the substance against her skin testingly.

It smelled terrible. She cringed and put it away.

 

A few weeks passed. Jyn saw less and less of Cassian and Moll. Then one day, she realized she hadn’t seen either of them at all for a while. Moll must have dispatched, Cassian, she had no idea where he’d be. She still felt he could round the corner at any moment. No wonder she had felt both comforted and anxious.

During a briefing of her next mission, she asked Mon Mothma what happened in passing.

“They dispatched a week ago,” she said clinically. She did not look happy about it, but it was only because Jyn was getting better at interpreting her calm expressions.

“He still went?”

“Your service was optional; his was not.”

Jyn stood up, brow knitting together.

“I thought this was all his idea?”

“He came to us with an offer, we assigned a mission suited to it.”

“So this wasn’t his pet project? Pretending to be a married imperial officer?”

Mothma’s hands folded in front of herself, her face collected and a little cold. “It would be best if you put the information released to you behind you. It’s a heavily delicate situation and you already know too much.”

“What was his offer?” Jyn wasn’t sure what her confusion was from. Nothing made sense, yet everyone seemed perfectly in control of the situation.

“That’s classified.”

The dismissal hit with a bite.

 

As the weeks passed, she grew aimless. Denying the council’s offer came with harsh consequences, she was being kept very much up in the air if she was necessary. Her missions were laughably simplistic if they came at all.

Kes and Bodhi tried to keep her optimistic.

“Our last few missions were all successes. You were given the option to turn them down, so they can’t punish you for choosing not to go.”

Jyn rubbed her eye, taking a needy swig of caf. “It’s a little more nuanced than that.”

Kes raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

She shrugged, not wanting to taint their friendship with the air of the walking wounded, and not wanting to weigh Bodhi down with any more ‘this is why none of us can be friends with Cassian’ histrionics. “Working with so much responsibility is not something they wanted to do with me. I’m unreliable. I proved them right by rejecting the offer.”

Kes clapped her on the back, rising to return back to work. “Well, you just have to show them that you are reliable. Maybe give something, and see what you get back.”

 

Jyn approached the table in the war room. It had taken a month’s worth of Kes’s continued praise (and accurate, because he had her doing everything from repairing engines and mopping floors, just to be an ass) to get her this audience. Mon Mothma raised her eyebrows, waiting to see what the fuss was all about, how the reluctant hero of Rogue One wanted to use this meeting.

“I want to work as a trainer.” Her arms crossed over her chest. “A regular, allotted time slot in the practice room. I’m too sloppy for field work, or so I’m told. But I’m a good fighter, and have seen more in the real world than some of the idealist kids from good families have. You want to prepare them? I’ve worked with some of the most guerilla parts of this rebellion.”

Mon Mothma’s eyes sparked with interest. “I’ll take it up with the Council.”

 

She was merely allowed to host a night class, to start with. An optional one. One she had to convince people to take on her own, without help or any advertizing. An experiment.

“It’s not The Academy,” she growled to Bodhi, who watched her pace around the practice room. It was five minutes until class started. “It’s not an optional workshop kind of training. For some spoiled kids blowing off study hours…”

“No one but you knows that yet. Start small. Build up some trust, and everyone will catch on, and people will fight to be in this class.”

She glared at him and then to the four bored-looking soldiers, stretching like she had advised them to do when they walked in. He patted her shoulder, smiling supportively.

As a passive aggressive power move, she was not allowed to keep the access code to unlock the training room she was assigned. Instead, she had to retrieve an override key from Draven before class and return it to him every night. She thought that was a little bit of overkill.

The Council seemed to want to nip this phase of contribution in the bud.

With an eerie sense of punctuality, about twelve more recruits filled the gym at the end of those tense five minutes.

Jyn was suspicious. Even she hadn’t anticipated more than ten people, from the word-of-mouth nature of advertizing, and it was not as though she was well-liked based on her reputation.

“What brings you all here?”

One of the quicker-to-please recruits piped up from the spot on the mat closest to Jyn, bent in an elaborate stretch;

“Kes Dameron said anyone who attended your class was exempt from extra drill training.”

Jyn smirked. Maybe it was a smile, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it as one.

His students were the most straight-backed and attentive, like this wasn’t elective. Like he was in the room, watching them, ready to scold. His presence was felt as she rolled people through pins, telling them what they did wrong. The only part of it that felt ‘elective’ was the fun of some of the moves, which were about as dirty as fighting could get. Jyn paced the room, explaining how to take out an ankle or finger or other weak spots…

“You have to detach yourself from your own squeamishness,” she explained, talking about a kick that nearly took off a toenail when she was fourteen, “Standards are limits, get rid of them in a fight. That makes you capable to go for the little things that hurt the most, like a fingernail or an ear…”

“Like an eye,” a Twi’Lek girl muttured.

Jyn’s next step faltered. Bodhi hissed from his spot across the room. He had been there for moral support, encouraging Jyn to use weapon-specific blocks and generally making her look good. He pushed off his lean on the wall, stepping forward just in case.

She approached the recruit, shoulders drawn, standing tall.

“Exactly like that,” Jyn replied, a firmness to her tone that caused the hush that had fallen over the room to become even more deafeningly uncomfortable. “You’re giving all of yourself to the rebellion. The best case scenario is only some of it gets taken away. You don’t get to safehold anything because it makes you squeamish. If you’re prepared to give your life, what tragedy is an eye?”

Jyn reached out suddenly, twisted her hand around a single tentacle, effectively locking the Twi’Lek’s head in a grip that she couldn’t break free from. Jyn used that leverage to bend the girl forward, speaking now to the rest of the group.  

“We all have things we can’t change that make us weaker in a fight. And we give those to the rebellion. In return you will be trained to make these things strengths. If we hide them, we all lose.”

She released the girl and returned to her previous point, marking out the best ways to maintain balance towards an opponent much larger than you.

At the end of class, Bodhi kissed her forehead, his dark eyes shining.

 _“This_ is where you’re needed,” he told her, and for the first time since she addressed the room that evening, Cassian entered her thoughts. She shook him away. She just worked on her cool-down as recruits filed out of the room, whispering about her.

Attendance for the next class doubled.

Kes returned from a mission, attended the first class she taught that he was on base for. Clapped her on the shoulder in a way that still made her body jerk back at the force of it, but was beginning to be endearing that way.

“Remember kids, lower your standards,” he would yell from the back of the room, and Jyn would flash him a lewd gesture behind her back.

 

A few weeks later, she still had to return temporary keys to Draven every night, but he hadn’t yet gathered anything to use to effectively end the class. Because it was informal, it could be attended by any rank in the rebellion, and because it wasn’t regulated, it was stylized enough to make people interested. Kes would occasionally stop by and watch, or shout out suggestions, and eventually wanted to show off things he learned. The nature of the class turned sharply towards collaboration, with people trading anecdotes that they had to back up by re-blocking the fight. Jyn was small and intense and not very diplomatic, so the class was never treated like a valid course of training by any of the higher ups in the rebellion, but reluctantly they let it continue as an elective for free time. But she was good teacher. And her students, while all subjected to her harsh temper and snark, liked her.

She limped back to her room after class after a few good weeks, feeling a lightness to herself she hadn’t felt in a while. It wasn’t happiness, but it was an ease. Her ankle was a little swollen from a spar where a recruit fell over onto her. She didn’t blame the lakaru who stumbled forward, she was already a little bleary from how much he looked like Bistan. She’d held it together for the rest of class, but Bodhi knew and warned her to take it easy.

Usually she’d ignore the injury, sleep it off. She considered it, wincing at the tightness with every step. It was long walk to her bunk, and the medbay was on the way.

 

Nurse Kalonia was on night duty. Jyn didn’t remember her, but she was the same nurse who found her crying in the cargo bay, sending her Bodhi and then Cassian. As she checked Jyn’s leg, Jyn was startled by how gentle her hands were. She was young and had a soft presence, comforting.

“I’ve heard about your combat class. Your students come here bruised and unable to stop talking about it.”

Jyn shrugged, suppressing a smile. “It keeps me busy.”

“You’re close with Cassian Andor, right?”

She must have flinched, because Kalonia looked stricken. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’d heard you were in Rogue One together.”

“We were,” Jyn pursed her lips. “It’s complicated.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

At the smallest amount of pressure, Jyn broke. With childish, twisting features, she let the story spill forth. Scarif and the missing and the miscommunications and trying to prove to him she was capable of letting it all go to be professional and how he set her up to prove herself wrong. She kept some details vague, like what happened on his lap. Nurse Kalonia was a good listener, patient and making sympathetic sounds at the right time to assure Jyn she was listening.

“I…” Jyn sighed, pressing her hands to her face and breathing out. “I lost the eye and got the scar during that mission. He thinks my face is his fault. He avoided me for months, and now he’s trying… to atone, I suppose. And he will not let that go, he’s obsessed with how I look, and it makes me feel terrible, and he plotted out this entire mission to fix me with a reconstructive surgery I wasn’t even sure I wanted.”

“Did he know that?”

“What?”

“That that’s not what you wanted?”

Jyn stared at the floor.

“I didn’t even know. I want to not have to think about it anymore.”

Kalonia nodded, “I don’t want to seem like I’m defending him, I’m just trying to understand.”

“I’ve racked my brain and I’m not sure it can be done.”

“I know Scarif was traumatic for the few survivors. Maybe he’s not dealing with it and is projecting a solution on something that, on a physical level, seems fixable. You can get a new eye and restorative surgery, and then when he sees you, he won’t be reminded of something he doesn’t want to face.”

“So I fix my face to repair a friendship?” Jyn snapped at her.

Kalonia shook her head, looking horrified. “No. _No._ He feels this way because he’s not dealing with his own trauma. It’s not your job to fix that.”

She handed Jyn an ice pack.

“Keep it elevated,” she said with a gentle smile. “And while I hope you’re not injured, maybe we can talk again soon.”

Jyn stared at the cold, blue pack in her hand. “I’d like that.”

 

Sleep was hard. She usually worked herself out to the point that when she made it to bed, she passed out once hitting the mattress. She was better fed than she’d ever been since childhood, her muscles becoming less wiry and firmer. Her health returned, at least physically. She felt less jagged, more sure of herself. She could teach this class, it was her purpose now. She tried not to think further of the deeply ruinous nature of her personal life. She didn’t need to be a person with much of a private half. Her most social self included bothering trainers for drills that they enjoyed using, or asking them to attend one class and offer insight. Jyn didn’t hog her power. She just wanted to use the best people to get the job done.

Maybe someone else had taught her that. That a few skilled soldiers could feel like a hundred.

The missing didn’t go away; she just ignored it better when he wasn’t there. It was replaced with a probability question, unseen but by that means unpredictable. Cassian wasn’t alive unless she saw him again, but he also wasn’t dead until announced. He existed to her in every shade in between. Remorseful, loving. Hateful, unrepentant.

Once, she could have sworn Cassian came to her bedside, spanning his long fingers up the side of her face and kissing her slow and senseless. But she opened her eyes, and her bed was cold, and he wasn’t there.

Once, as Bodhi toyed with a datapad before class started -he and Kes made a point to be there when they were available- and Jyn stretched before anyone arrived, she did hear about Cassian. And that was the only time.

Bodhi hissed, and Jyn crawled to his side, curious. There was a feed of Imperial Pomp and Circumstance; a celebration of an anniversary of some human rights violation they posed as a grand victory. Cassian was there in a group photo, with Moll, looking happy and married and adoring. He could fake what she could not. She didn’t even recognize him. He was playing a character. He was wearing the uniform, like the one he’d stolen on Scarif. She wanted to take it off his body, and in the lonely hours of the night, that morphed into a fantasy of stripping off the fitted jacket, the tight boots, the false self, and holding him to her breast when he finally, finally told her he was sorry and made the words stick this time.

She arranged his apology in her head time and time again, but it didn’t fit, like a too small shoe. Sizeable enough, but it wouldn’t get her very far.

Bored, tired, frustrated, she dipped her hand under the waistband of her sleep pants, conjure the faces that brushed close to hers in the practice room, hands that lingered, eyes that caught her in the mess hall. They were there. She didn’t know when they came back, when her face caused them not to dart away. The eyepatch stayed, but she stopped with the headscarf for class. It just got in the way. Then she kept forgetting to put it back on.

She tried to picture these people, slip into a new part of herself, recover something else. But pleasure didn’t feel the same, being constantly reminded of Cassian between her thighs, letting her rut her body against him. Pleasure didn’t feel the same without rage. There were people that she could have that wouldn’t mean melting into intense anger at their closeness.

But imagining them, they always morphed into the same face. That was usually the point in the evening she gave up, withdrawing her hand, heart pounding.

 

Part of her routine, after handing the key back to Draven every evening, was swinging by the medbay for the nightshift visit with Harter Kalonia. She wasn’t an emergency responder, but more of a casual first-aid provider for training injuries of the general needs of anyone living in a communal space. So Jyn didn’t feel like she was imposing too much, and she did often have bruises that could use an ice pack. And returning those packs made a good reason to come back the next night.

They didn’t always talk about Cassian, which was a relief. Jyn found that the more she talked about it, the less substance she had to stretch out of every moment. It became less of a story of _“and then, and then, but then”_ and more of _“He did, because,”_ and leaving it at a simple statement. Some of those ‘becauses’ were still harsh and biting.

Harter eventually asked Jyn about the salve for her burns, if it was helping at all. It were assigned to all burn patients, so she rightfully assumed Jyn had been given some.

Jyn stared at the floor.

“I haven’t…I didn’t use it.”

Nurse Kalonia looked empathetic, but scolding. “It won’t hurt to try.”

“I just… I don’t know why I keep avoiding it.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll still have that intimidating scar. It’ll just look less chapped.”

Jyn couldn’t help but let out a breathy, scandalized laugh. “Shut up.”

 

Eyes caught her face from across the bar. Sparkly, young, idealistic.

She wanted to bite the soft flesh of an innocent. Men like Cassian bit back too hard. Her teeth were too sharp, needed wearing down. The smugness of these boys enlisted in the rebel alliance, they needed to be clawed up a little.

She remembered him as one of her students, if they could even be called that. Last week, the holder of a brutal pin, his partner flailing and struggling under him, he tossed his head back heroically and called out : “Erso, how’s this for lowered standards?”

She had found herself smiling. “I wouldn’t kick it out of bed.”

It wasn’t easy, with Cassian. That’s what she had wanted. This. Easy.

She couldn’t fault Cassian for thinking they could fuck things into being better. Like a few well placed thrusts would knock things back into place. Sometimes she wanted it so bad, she pretended it could. He would breeze in, back from his dangerous, secret mission and slide between her legs with the right words and even righter touches.

She hated it, like the shameful orgasm she’d had, spilled across his lap, her body craved things her mind wasn’t ready for. His face was a placeholder, yet to be replaced with new wanting.

She tried to replace it faster than it could rebuild on its own. She went to bed with the boy making eyes from across the bar.

Her body wasn’t ready for what she subjected it to. She thought the pleasure Cassian pushed from her was bad, she forgot sex with no pleasure at all. She thought she could go through the steps and continue on, normal again.

Just his fingers pushing inside her _hurt._ She flinched, but not noticeably. Because her partner wasn’t reading her well enough.

It hurt to be so _known_ by someone else, and still utterly misunderstood, and still not wanted. To still want that person there, ready with their intimate knowledge.

To try and fight that impulse, she kept going. Pressing farther and farther into the shell of herself, to the person she was before she met him. A scavenger, through and through.

When he spoke, it jarred her, and she realized she had been ignoring the person on top of her, wanting to lie back and just have it be over.

“Are you going to leave your eyepatch on?” he had asked her when he stilled at her entrance, and the answer to her was so obvious, it hurt to even spit it out. 

_Yes._

He was drunk. They were both drunk. It was stupid and childish of him to ask. But she hadn't asked for more from him.

It wasn’t a lover’s concern, but morbid curiosity. She knew that this was the salacious detail that would not be private between them. Panicked, she withdrew herself, requesting that he leave. He had the compassion to know exactly why, mumbling apologies, and wandered out of her room with slumped shoulders.

Faintly, she wondered what his name was. She’d heard it, but it wasn’t coming up.

She tried to calm down. Tried to not picture Cassian appearing, concerned, snuggling against her like the night they shared a bed. The image gave as much comfort as pain, a dualistic swirl of ache and relief.

That was Cassian. That was who he would always be to her.

She was learning the hard way. Sex wasn’t mechanical, it was chemical, it was live and writhing and breathing. It definitely was not medicinal.

But it felt good, and they had convinced themselves that maybe, just maybe, being forced to work together would…

Jyn shut her eyes. Felt the burn of phantom lips on hers, trying to recycle the warmth another body left on her skin into a memory. Cassian was missed, as always, but he wasn’t close. There was nothing physical that lingered.

She picked up the com link Chirrut and Baze left her.

It fuzzed, then clicked. An answer.

“Jyn?” she heard a sleepy voice. Chirrut, who would be able to find the link in the dark, because that’s how he found everything. She heard Baze’s sleepy, concerned grunt.

“I miss Cassian,” she said softly, speaking into the dark.

Baze’s next grunt was solemn. “I know, little sister.”

“He never looked at me.” Finally, the tears came. She gripped the com link in her fist, letting them hear it as she cried. Someone had to know that this was happening and _it overwhelmed her._ “He never looked at me until it was too late.”

“He wasn’t strong enough,” Chirrut told her gently. “Not like you.”

There was some fumbling, Baze said “hold on.”

She held tight, listening to the furred, crackling sound of a dead line. They came back, not talking, but audible. Occasionally, the monk or his partner would breathe tiredly through their nose, and she’d know they were still there, worried.

“He’s a fool,” Baze told her.

“I already know that,” Jyn laughed bitterly.

She heard a rustling, it must have been one of them sitting up.

“One day, this pain will weaken, and you will reach a level of contentment. Your soul will be restored to a place of rest. Maybe when that day comes, he’ll be ready, too.”

There was a knock on her door. She opened it. A very tired-looking Bodhi stood on the other side.

“Are you alright?”

Baze and Chirrut must have sent him.

“Someone was over here,” she murmured, her eye fogging with tears. Bodhi looked pained, wrapping his arms around her.

“Not good?”

Sinking into her friend, the person who best understood who she was because he _wanted_ to, Jyn couldn’t hide anymore.

“I want Cassian,” she finally admitted it. This was supposed to be a night of shirked responsibilities and fun and carelessness. Nothing deeper than “you’re sexy” would be felt. Not a night of confessions, especially the hardest one of all. Bodhi sat with her until she fell asleep, her head curled in his lap, hand clenched in hers. Baze and Chirrut occasionally spoke into the com to remind her that she still had all of them.

In the morning, Bodhi stroked her hair, calming her when she flinched awake.

“I have to go Jyn. I have to report for a mission in a half hour.”

She scrambled upright, her throat tightening. “You should have told me.”

He shook his head, calming her with his large, understand eyes.

“It’s alright, Jyn. It’s what you do.” he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“What you do when?”

“When you care.”

She hugged Bodhi goodbye, already missing him before he left. Once he was gone, she went to her dresser, picked up the tube of salve and smeared it over the scars on her face. It smelled bad. But it was cool, and gentle on her skin. 

She started using it every day. 

 

Two nights later, the soreness was beginning to fade. Beginning to. She had Kes step in for her last class, but she missed working out her aggression. She’d pushed herself in a brutal workout alone after class wrapped up, punishing her stupidity. She nearly passed out as soon as she reached her room, hot water bottle clenched between her legs. Kalonia’s lips had been thin when Jyn requested it, to shy to say why. It was clear on her face.

“Jyn?”

The com link buzzed with a familiar voice. Jyn lifted her head from her pillow, confused. She fumbled for the com. It had to be the middle of the night.

There were obvious questions, like, how did you get connected to this link, _how did you know I had it, why are you using it_ ** _now_ **_of all times,_ but she wasn’t awake enough to form them fully.

“What?”

“Jyn, do you want the surgery? If I could get it for you?”

The sigh came barreling out of her. This was not a middle of the night conversation.

“You wake me up for a question like that?” her head flopped back down. “Cassian, _I don’t know._ Why does it matter?”

It was odd that he’d be calling. That felt dangerous. He wasn’t usually risky.

She heard him talking frantically over his shoulder, away from the link. He was acting manically, something she did not deserve to have to handle.

She closed her eyes, sighed. _No, it’s fine, I’ll wait._ “Do you have a friend in the Empire you’ve been rubbing elbows with who would love to make me over?”

 _Maybe he’s drunk,_ she dismissed, rubbing her eyes. _Next he’ll be sobbing ‘are you mad at me?’._

 _“Jyn,”_ the line crackled, and his voice was not ponderous, or contemplative, or pleading. He needed to know _now._

“Why do you need to know?” her voice pushed out of her, urgent. All business.

“This mission is...it’s not going well. I’m thinking about aborting it.”

“What does that have to do with me…?”

Of course she wasn’t getting it. She didn’t take the mission, and it was already a stretch, an uneasy one, that she was earning it as the non-asset that she was.

The realization shot through her like a blaster burn.

 _She_ wasn’t necessary to that mission. Cassian was. He was also a little too qualified for playing house in a long-term, boring assignment. The imbalance had always sounded off to her. She’d been well versed on what was a hazing mission. This was by far the worst kind; in order to earn the kind of standing in the rebellion he’d already had for years.

Her surgery wasn’t _her_ reward for participating. It was his.

“This is why you’re doing this?”

She heard him adjust, drawing closer to the link, quieter. “The initial deal was for the two of us. Your got a new eye, and I got... something for me. You were required as insurance so that you wouldn’t run. I managed to argue my way back in with a different partner. I was lost, Jyn. It was a mistake. I thought this was what you wanted.”

 _Your leg,_ she wanted to scream, _they promised you a better leg and you want that leg as badly as you want my new face._

“But Moll doesn’t owe them. How is that an equal trade?”

“Moll was just doing her job. I may owe them a little more than I initially did.”

“You’re insane. Pull out of this mission, Cassian.”

“Jyn, I’m not letting the option get away from you. I will see this through, I don't need what I asked for, if this is what you want.”

Harter’s words echoed through her mind. _Did he know that wasn’t what you wanted?_

“Then why even ask, if you’re not going to listen to what I want?”

_“What do you want, Jyn?”_

She clenched her fists, staring at the ceiling. Their last few conversations involved so much not looking it was like he was in the room with her. So anger-invoking it was like he never left. “I don’t want the surgery. It wouldn’t take away a problem that isn’t skin deep. This is deeper. I want my life to be my own, Cassian. For you to remove me as the object of your personal debt.”

He sighed, tired. Stressed. Worn down.

 _“What do you want,_ Cassian?” she countered.

“To see you.”

She tried not to grimace. “Even with the scar?”

His breath quickened, petrified. “Jyn, I don’t care about the fucking scar anymore, I just want to see _you,_ _no matter what_ _that means,_ and if I stay much longer, I may not get to, do you understand?”

“What if I don’t want to see you?”

He sighed. She had a very distinct, terrifying feeling that he wouldn’t come back at all if that were true.

“Is that what you want?”

She hadn’t thought of that. She thought _about_ seeing him, not how she felt about seeing him.

“I don’t know.”

“I understand. I’ve done so many things wrong. Jyn, that night...”

“We proved I couldn’t handle it. Even if I did want that surgery, I wouldn’t want it handed to me without earning it. Let it go. I never asked you to do this. Don't swap your prize for me. Whatever you asked for, if it's worth staying for, stay. I don't need to owe you anything.”

“No, the night before then, when I was injured, and you came to my room. You said that-”

She shut her eyes, pressing the button to cancel out his call. She spoke over him until he silenced. “I told you we weren’t going to talk about that night. Call it all off if it’s unsafe. Cassian, _just come home.”_

She switched off the com.

Sleep didn’t come, but because she deserved to be there, he received no more of her time, waking or otherwise.

 

She thought seeing him again would be as painful as it was on the note that they parted. It wasn’t. He was coming. She was going.

She’d been off base for his return, a jumble of missions putting weeks between when he was back and she’d managed to avoid him when he was there again, only for him to be shipped off and the cycle continued like that for a shockingly long time.

She'd heard it whispered of him in the mess hall; _it didn't go well. He's not the same._

She wondered if he still got his new leg. 

They happened to be on base at the same time, knowingly so, for about ten minutes total. He was unloading his ship, Jyn about to board hers. Kes Dameron glanced over his shoulder, saluted an “Andor,” in an obvious way to signal to Jyn. Her eye flickered up from adjusting the strap of her pack. She’d never told him about any problems with Cassian, so she was surprised he intuited enough to be so protective. He shrugged back at her.

There was a look on his face that made her remember Bodhi in her room, getting no sleep to stay up for her, despite leaving for a mission at dawn. _It’s what you do, when you care._

Standing, she faced Cassian.

It all happened in merely a moment.

He was _really_ thin. Cassian Andor did not look well after all those months away. _This_ was the somber captain she had met, without the spark of a good cause in his eyes. He was chewing at the bit of his sense of hope.

He wanted to see her again, and this was clearly him taking that opportunity to abandon the mission and come home. His body seemed to radiate a relief. His brown eyes were soft. He stared at her, a tentative smile forming. Of her convinced partner in Rogue One, ready to take off on a death mission with her, for their cause.

He was awake, he was standing, he was walking, he had been on missions before seeing her; so she knew he was fine. But looking at him, it felt like being brought to his deathbed. That she was there to make things easier for him to say goodbye.

That seeing her was _good_ for him.

Jyn nodded impassively. Her eyes flickered down to his leg, but quickly enough he wouldn't notice, and figure out what she had know all along. She _hated_ that leg. She might have hated it more than he ever hated her face. 

“Captain," she said, chin raised. 

And walked right past him.

She heard the breath he released, the only indication he could give in so public a place for all the shame and regret he felt. She kept going.

She kept rigid and contained until the ship lifted off, and Kes Dameron took one look at her and requested she look over inventory in the hull. She obeyed, and when the door slid shut, her face clenched like a fist, red and angry. She accepted her tears. She felt she’d earned them.

There was a particular pain to knowing that he looked awful, and despite everything she had done to try and stop it, it was his own fault.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillmepleasedon'tkillme
> 
> Please note changes in the tags for content you potentially aren't comfortable with.

There were several new faces at her next class. Anticipating her question, one of them blurted out: “Captain Andor required it for his trainees.”

“We weren’t supposed to tell her,” replied a very terrified looking Lisbon. 

Jyn nodded, solemn. Resisted the urge to roll her eyes heavenward. 

She tried to gather it up inside herself to fist into something to be angry about. But what the hell did he have to get out of it if a couple of young soldiers he trained sparred with her for an hour three times a week? What did he have to gain from making her class well-attended? There was a compliment in there somewhere, or a ploy for attention, so letting it lie seemed the best option either way. 

He was such an easy punching bag in the beginning. The excess of pain made her so ready to yell at him, hunt him down for a confrontation. 

She just didn’t have the energy for that kind of effort anymore. 

It was really the only gesture he could have made that actually came across as… kind of nice. 

She could fight him about the presumption, but then this would all continue. They were both stuck in the same place. They had to work together. She would have to let it go. 

She started the class with breathing exercises, for herself, not for them. Chirrut’s guided meditation that he had led her through about a month ago to calm her down. 

With each breath, she practised the idea;

She let it go. She let him go. 

 

She was better off without him. He saw that now. 

She laughed in the dining hall. Kes Dameron regularly lauded her as the best hand-to-hand combat trainer they had. Draven grimly informed him there hadn’t been any hiccups in her behavior since being grounded and put to work. Mon Mothma reluctantly admitted that maybe this was where Erso was best suited, working on her own. Bodhi, once, hushed, confessed to him that her health was much better, she wasn’t in that dark place anymore. Then the pilot hurried away, not wanting to have to talk to him. 

Cassian swallowed some of the rejection that Bodhi didn’t want to associate with him, just glad to hear that Jyn was improving. 

But only so glad. He didn’t want for her to move forward when he was stuck. It wasn’t easy to know, from the uneasiness that plagued him, wanting to keep her close. She was like prayer beads he’d seen soldiers seem to pull out of thin air, not visible until the final moments, winding a tangible piece of hope around his hand to place his faith. 

Selfishly, he didn’t want her to do so well without him, but he knew that it  _ had _ to be that way. He wasn’t going to be blind to that anymore, even if it made him feel better. He had wanted a lot of things, and his pursuit of those things had caused more than enough damage. But he could want, if he didn’t act on it. He could want. 

“She’s better off without me,” he dismissed, and K2 automated a blunt reply: 

“That’s because you refuse to take care of yourself, and that fact has become exceedingly, visibly obvious.”

“I’m fine, K2,” he snapped.

K2 had taken up the annoying habit of tracking his caloric intake, sleep schedule, and making a log of every time his hands were shaking. Acknowledging the intrusion would only mean acknowledging the need for it, so it became perfectly clear what he had to do about it. 

Jyn would later find K2 wandering about on his own, and spared only the slightest of care at wondering where Cassian was without his best friend. 

Cassian was fine. Cassian was functional. He spent his time working, avoiding social spheres that would make Jyn feel uncomfortable. He asked his trainees about her class, they always had nice things to say. 

“She had this great story about her weapons dealer ex-boyfriend. He almost blew her head off but she showed us how she disarmed someone firing from point-blank range.”

She’d survived that. She’d survived more. She made it a story, her story, and she dared anyone to take the victory away from her. She did what he couldn’t. She could face it instead of running forward, always forwards. 

But Cassian didn’t like to think about it, because that meant that it had happened in the first place. 

 

Minor victories started building for the Alliance. Morale needed the few, minor celebrations it held, medals being awarded, informal gatherings more and more frequent to celebrate promotions. 

At one such party, Jyn was launching herself at Bodhi in excited hugs over his own promotion, who was shy about the attention and the near-constant offers to buy him a round of drinks from everyone in the room. 

Kes and Jyn were competing in completely ill-advised drinking contests. Her students kept trying to pick her up and carry her around the bar, which she would escape in increasingly graceless ways. 

Bodhi was there, holding a glass or Corellian rum he didn’t seem to know what to do with, accepting Jyn into his arms.

“You’re back,” she held him tight. Two weeks felt so long. 

What Bodhi had to say next had to be bad, because he took a stalling sip of rum, and he rarely drank. He winced as it went down, but his eyes said the words wouldn’t feel any better coming up. 

“Cassian’s here,” his voice was casual. Jyn took the glass from his hand playfully. 

“Is he?” it was a forced lightness, murmured over the lip of the glass, but she loved Bodhi for not questioning it. “I hadn’t even noticed him.”

It scared her to realize that she wasn’t lying.

But her eyes scanned the room, and towards the back, his eyes caught her. He looked away first. 

She wanted to choose when they spoke again. They had to work together. This was going to take effort. 

She approached like an attack. His back was turned to her. A surprise attack. 

“I owe you for some of my best students.”

Cassian turned at the sound of her voice, face frozen, not knowing how she would feel about him. “You look good,” he blurted out, a little stunned. 

Jyn’s eye slid over him, a rigid, trained sense of boredom splayed across her face. 

He looked thin. Really thin. Weary and tired. 

And she did look better. She felt better. That was the work she had done while he was gone. 

She’d though if he looked worse, she would feel better. She didn’t ache at the sight of him, but it was sad to look at. 

Jyn stood up straighter. Let her guard down for a minute to see what happened.

He gestured vaguely to his own cheek, where her scar would be. “It looks like it’s healing.”

“It’ll always be there. I’ve been using the salve for it. It helps.”

He stared at his glass. She saw a tremor in his hand, all the way to his shoulder. 

“I’m glad,” he choked out, “that’s really great, Jyn.”

“I have a friend in the medbay, she talked me into it. It can’t repair nerves in most of the scar tissues, but it’ll soften a lot of the skin and honestly I’ve been getting more flexibility in my face back because of it.”

She bit off more interesting facts. Maybe drinking pitchers with straws wasn’t her and Kes’s best idea. He nodded intently as she spoke, clearly choking on a similar onslaught of things to say. She tried to beat him to it;  _ “Why, _ Cassian?”

Why all of this. Why did he have to make it hurt worse.

He looked away. He just looked so tired, the spark forming during those few days together on their first mission completely missing. “I thought I was helping, and we were so damaged that I...became more convinced I had to get this for you. To fix it.”

She leaned against one of the tables, crossing her arms. He could read it in her body language that this meant she was going to stay. For now.

“Think of it this way, if what I needed was, say, a promotion, would you  _ do everything _ for that to happen? Pull strings with the Council, commission me for work that would put me in line for that sort of thing, override seniority, use connections, beg, borrow, and steal?”

His jaw tightened. “I would help you.”

She felt it. That pull. That togetherness. The connection, moment to moment, of when they would be in the same space again. 

But the pull away was still there, and that’s what she wanted. His resistance to give in to her. The fighter for the rebellion. The honorable soldier. The one who wouldn’t cheat the Alliance out of what it deserved, not even for her. 

_ That’s _ what she had wanted to be there. It may feel better being loved for the wrong reasons, but as long as he was seeing sense of how it was still wrong. 

“That’s not  _ helping. _ That’s doing the work for me.”

There was a darkness in his eyes she’d only seen once before, after taking off on Eadu, soaked in rain and righteousness. He seemed to understand she in the middle of making a point, so he stayed quiet. 

“Cassian,” she continued “what would you tell me if I wanted a promotion?”

He shook his head, looking at the ground. “That it would come to you if it was meant to. To work hard. To be open to opportunites. Put in a good word for you, when you earned it. Which you have. But that was then. Now? I’d tell you to just ask the council for it, because of all the work you’ve done on your own, you could have it.”

“All I had to do was ask, is that what you’re saying?”

He glanced up at her, cowed. “I thought you needed more help than you did. I wasn’t...thinking clearly.”

She shuddered out a laugh, because if it was this easy, why was this confession happening when things were irreparable?

“This isn’t any different, Cassian, because even when I wanted it, I didn’t  _ need _ that surgery to survive. Maybe I thought I did, once. And if that part of me knew what you were doing to get it for me, she’d be forever in your debt. But I don’t like her, she’s sick and unhappy, and I don’t like her for you if that’s how you want her. I don’t  _ want _ it anymore. So I need you to step back. Stop owing me. It will all come to me if it was meant to.”

He didn’t answer, but his face softened. 

“Assigning me to that mission was wrong Cassian, because it took everything out of my hands, and I never asked you to.”

“I know. I should never, ever have put you in line for that mission, Jyn, I regret even thinking you should have gone out there. That what you needed was…” he cleared his throat, “that you needed it at all.”

All that pain, and he was suddenly so ready to listen to her. It wasn’t fair, that she’d thought and thought about his every intention and when he started showing the barest sign of penance it suddenly seemed like they had hope to be able to smile at each other again. He was now, pleadingly, the lines of his sunken eyes deepened. Why did he look so much older now. 

She stepped back. She let go.

“So next time, don’t try and sacrifice both of us to some martyred undercover mission, believing you’re single-handedly rescuing me, especially after treating me like I don’t exist.”

Cassian winced, his eyes intent on her face. 

“I’m not good at…” he didn’t seem to know how to encapsulate his actions of the past few months into a single word. 

Jyn pulled a confidence-building sip from hard Corellian liquor. “Oh, by the way, I forgot to ask; your new partner? Did you like fucking her?”

Cassian paled, his breath hissed out of his nose. It was a cheap shot, but that was almost her in another life. It could have been her stuck in that thankless mission. 

She thought it was just a petty remark, but Cassian seemed to take it deep into himself, like the full hilt of a sword. Jyn thought she was wielding merely a knife. 

“What’s wrong?” she pressed, “Don’t you do this all the time?”

Cassian was gripping the edge of the bar. He actually looked dizzy. There was a way his gaze seemed to retract into itself, drawing himself away from the room he was standing in. 

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out, fist tightening on the bar. He looked away from her. It felt like he was always looking at her lately, but he couldn’t bring himself to anymore. 

Jyn walked away first. She went back to the world she was a part of now. She asked Kes about intelligence missions, the logistics of fucking your partner. Kes grimaced. 

“You can usually get lax about keeping up appearances in missions under less scrutiny. But at the end of the day, if your cover is one who has sex, it’s not a game for kids anymore. You do what you have to. That’s why I’m not in intelligence.”

Jyn wrinkled her nose.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Like I said, it’s not for me. You have to be a special level of fucked up to be able to put yourself through that.”

“Well, that’s Cassian,” Jyn swayed on her feet for a minute. Kes secured a hand on her shoulder. 

“That’s what you say in your class. Everyone has something different to give. Cassian didn’t think the rebellion was asking too much of him. You did. So you assigned yourself something else.”

Jyn closed her exposed eye, shaking her head. “He’s still fucked in the head for doing it.”

“Easy, easy. People like Cassian are necessary to the rebellion. Doesn’t mean they’re the easiest to be around.”

“Good luck to him when there is no rebellion, and his quirks aren’t so necessary anymore. Then he’ll just be a fucked up guy with a gun.”

She reached across the bar for another drink.

“Okay, you’ve had enough,” Kes said, with a forced-casual edge. He motioned Bodhi to join them. The pilot was worse off than Jyn, and was a tactful choice, because Jyn was assigned to deliver him back to his bunk.

A conversational drunk, as Jyn supported his weight on their way back to his room, Bodhi informed her that Moll had died during her and Cassian’s mission. She’d been poisoned before either of them found out they were compromised. 

“A pity,” Bodhi slurred, “they say he’s blaming himself, but logs were pretty consistent that she was flying too close to the sun and she’d been repeatedly asked by the council to pull back. They weren’t a good team.”

It still would have happened, there would have been just as much risk for whoever went. Mothma had all but outright said, a few times, with Jyn needling her, that Moll had been the first choice for the mission until Cassian stepped in. 

Jyn was reeling. She stumbled under Bodhi’s weight. 

Her rejection of the mission didn’t cause this. It wasn’t her fault. _It wasn’t her fault._

“All that for nothing,” Jyn slurred, her hair falling into her face. 

She wondered how Cassian was taking it; his power of her had vanished into nothing but an ache, a soft pang of guilt that could be ignored, and his partner was dead, he was no closer to their best than they were before. 

All of that for nothing. 

 

Three days later, when accounting that night, Harter was shockingly unsympathetic. 

“You shouldn’t have said that, Jyn.”

Jyn chewed her thumbnail, and indignant look frozen on her face. “Why the hell not? It could have been me on that mission.”

Nurse Kalonia’s slender fingers went back to re-organizing her supplies. She sighed. 

“Cassian has lived with his mistakes in regards to that mission, let me assure you.”

“You’re awfully defensive of him, whose side are you even on?”

Jyn was unused to female companions, and was beginning to think she’d misinterpreted her newfound friend. Harter’s eyes were soft but pained. 

“The Alliance’s,” Kalonia said dryly. 

Jyn swallowed, biting her tongue for the next barbed thing that came to mind. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s in the medbay a lot. I can’t say much about what happens there, Jyn, I could lose my job. But…” Kalonia lowered her voice significantly. “His injuries are not consistent to those sustained from field work.”

Jyn’s nostrils flared. 

“In what way?”

“I am not allowed to disclose-”

_ “In what way?” _

Kalonia shut a drawer, composed and authoritative. “Figure it out yourself.”

Jyn was breathing hard, trying to calm this wave of disgust for the nurse beside her, who she thought she could trust, about poor little Cassian Andor and his fucked-up way with dealing with things, and how he now apparently deserved her pity…

“I can’t imagine what he could possibly be suffering from,” Jyn said lightly. Her face was trained to indifference. 

Kalonia was kind, but she was also honest. She stopped what she was doing to face Jyn, even if the rebel didn’t want to hear it.

“I think you already know.”

Jyn did. She didn’t want to. But she did. Because she saw his eyes in her mind the second it clicked. How scared they were. 

Some of Saw’s men harmed themselves. They were more fanatical. Prone to displays of devotion to a noble cause. It was usually ignored. They burned out quickly. 

Cassian didn’t seem to want to self-flagellate like a monk...or anything of that nature, for the rebellion. Maybe he was hard on himself. But not on the outside. Wasn’t he?

Kalonia was rarely so clinical as when she said; “If you take away the rebellion out of Cassian Andor, he’s a six year old boy. That’s it. I’m not saying what he did was right, but that’s why he did it. Plain and simple.”

“I’m not his mother.” Jyn rose, tired of having her supposed friend poking around at old wounds. Still, something bothered her. Something she hadn’t thought to ask. She hesitated at the door. 

“I’ve seen working limbs regenerate. Nerves repaired. Surely they could have given him a better leg than the one he has.”

Kalonia’s face softened. Jyn flushed. It was an unspoken, horrifying realization.  _ You do still care, just a little. _

“He would have had to remain conscious to repair nerves. There’s constant reflex testing for something as major as a limb. It requires strength and cooperation with those operating the procedure on him. Cassian Andor had neither of those things upon his return from Scarif.”

Jyn’s face was drawn. She didn’t want to think about the state he was in, because these things were hard to see clearly. She had been in pain too, back then. 

“I’m not saying you have to marry him, or that you owe him something,” Kalonia put her hand on Jyn’s shoulder, “But it’s just not that simple.”

Jyn nodded, patted Harter’s hand. 

“I would have ignored any of the boys if they had told me this,” she replied gruffly. “Thanks.”

 

That night, Jyn hacked into the mission data. She made an evening of it, rum and her datapad and a night in. 

She ignored anything Cassian reported. She didn’t trust it yet. She instead read up on Moll. 

Her logs were regular, efficient, and lengthy. Jyn found it sort of tragic in how focused she was:

**Had a long conversation with lead Officer in Imperial Propaganda. Specifies in children’s entertainment. Attached are the names of the last three projections he produced, all have heavily war-sympathetic themes. This may be a sign the Empire is viewing the Rebellion as more of a threat than a petty squabble and investing in future generations of recruitment. Upon hearing this, my partner had to excuse himself, which was considered rude to all in attendance and frankly detrimental to our cover. I had to invent a younger sibling that would be the first to enlist that had him seem weak. The men were not impressed.**

Jyn tried not to make a face. She was just doing her job, but could she not treat him like a child?

Mere days later:

**Captain Andor is growing increasingly erratic. Will not commit to our cover in ways that are properly convincing. As outlined in mission requirements, the maids need evidence of a functioning married couple, and in extracting that evidence he has become unstable.**

Jyn narrowed her eyes. She had expected to pity this dead agent, her tragic loss, but the more she read, the more uncomfortable she became. She hadn’t known what she set out to find, reading through it. Maybe something to make her conversation with Kalonia sting less. Maybe she thought it all would be  _ Cassian was perfect for this mission because he has the emotional range of a powered-down droid. _ This was not helping her feel better.

She sped through a few months.

**Cassian Andor increasingly unstable when in private. Will not initiate touch as required. Have had to be assertive to extract evidence of our union. When reminding him of this same expectation of him on previous missions, he becomes harder to handle.**

Jyn put down her drink. She remembered to do the breathing Chirrut taught her. The Alliance hadn’t dealt with Cassian’s aftermath of this mission, that much was clear. She let her eyes scan causally because a close reading was going to be too hard. 

**Have only been informed of Andor’s disability on this day. While it offers clarification for some of our miscommunications, this is information that should have been disclosed to me in the briefing.**

Jyn’s lips twisted. Cassian really managed to go to bed with her for months before she saw the seam in his thigh that lead to the prosthetic. How like him. 

Moll's last entry:

**It is clear that I am in a precarious situation. Cassian Andor is a liability to our mission, should he be dealt with accordingly?**

Jyn let her breath release from her nose. She covered her mouth with her hand, as though that could control the anxiety pulsing her lungs in shallow compressions. 

The status of the mission was marked as failed. Which meant no new leg.

She remembered the smirking face he gave her a glimmer of, as she straddled his lap to try and humiliate him for thinking he got the best of her. Before that backfired. It was bitter, and she always thought that was to keep her out. To be a slap, to remind her what the rebellion was asking of her. 

_ “Why can’t we each get something out of this?” he had asked. _

Evidence, Moll had said. Touches in public. A feigned interest. Commitment to their cover. 

Things that were harder to fake. An established bond. Affection. Cum on the sheets when the maids took them away in the morning. 

**Have had to be assertive.**

Would _she_ have made him do that? Take it into her own hands? 

That’s why that mission had been so big, so different. That the obvious, sick, fucked up conclusion was ‘it would be bearable if I was there with you.’

He was failing at that. The log all but said he was about to be picked off as unnecessary. Maybe Draven insisted he be given a stern warning and another chance. Maybe Mothma begged clemency for a good soldier. But someone had intervened on his behalf, because he was still alive. 

Whether her being there, making it better had been true or not; it had all been for nothing.

 

Cassian attended a class. Tactfully ignoring her last words to him. Unable to give up, no matter how much she kicked him away. 

Bodhi came with him, clearly annoyed about it. Keeping an eye on him. 

Cassian’s eyes lit up when she looked him dead in the face, and incredulous lift to her brow.

“I just wanted to see-” 

But he stopped talking when she turned her back on him to criticize the footwear choice of one of the teenage recruits. 

“No. Those shoes are for the shower or barracks. I am not having you break an ankle. Be back in ten minutes with different shoes or don’t come back at all.”

She did her best to ignore him, as he did her when he was in her shoes. 

Cassian tried to swallow down his pride, listen to her guide her students. There was a beauty to it, the way she held herself. The one that he had found intoxicating and dazzling when they met. 

Jyn didn’t spare him any glances as he worked through the exercises. He was impressive and deadly as ever. But tired. Tired as always, his head was elsewhere.

Bodhi caught her elbow when she passed him. 

“I’m sorry,” he hissed, “it was come with him to monitor him or he would come alone. He could not be reasoned with.”

Jyn squeezed Bodhi’s hand. 

“Every time I see him it reminds me of what I avoided,” she lied, easily, with a smile.

“You two should spar,” said the same troublesome Twi’Lek. Jyn had just been taking a begrudging liking to her. So much for good faith.

To be fair it was common. Jyn and Kes sparred ever so often to keep people gossiping and taking bets, Jyn had a habit of pinning him to the mat until he cried out a designated embarrassing statement. 

Wordlessly, Jyn beckoned Cassian closer, and like a trained pet, he obeyed, a hopeful look in his eye. She didn’t make eye contact.

She knew his weakness. The worst part was, he didn’t know she knew. They parried a moment or two. Blocked good hits, left openings to only  _ just _ block to demonstrate a good hit. It was instinctual,  _ you did good, let that sink in for those watching. _ It was funny, he could still read her body really well, and she felt understanding flow through her over his next moves. He was able to allow her to attack until she just got bored and lazy, and then one perfectly landed hit would knock her off balance. He was focused. He seemed relieved. 

But there were the things she knew about him now.

At the first opportunity, she hooked the knee of his leg. The one that she hated. 

If his limp body was anything to go by, it still caused him some problems. 

One moment he was driving an elbow towards her -marking, even she knew it wouldn’t  _ hurt _ \- and the next he was on the ground. Just dropped like dead weight. He lifted himself on his elbows, his mouth hanging open and eyes wide. He couldn’t breathe. He was waiting for her to indicate that she knew. 

She chose to lie, because it was easier. She masked her face in shock at her lucky hit. 

“I think that concludes our lesson,” she said sharply. Cassian didn’t get up. 

She remembered when the roles were reversed. 

_ I’m handling it. _

But this time around, was she Cassian, or was she Lisbon?

Bodhi moved towards her, maybe even to help him up. She waved him away. Because he trusted her, he got the room clear as she knelt beside Cassian, smoothing her hand down his back. 

“Are you okay?”

He flinched when she touched him. She withdrew her hand. His breaths were deep but quiet. She gave him space to try and reclaim his composure. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, almost inaudibly. 

“Are you hurt?”

_ “How did you know?” _

Jyn sighed, wiping her palms on the legs of her pants. 

“Right before that night we don’t take about. When you got wounded.”

He moved like he was going to get up and leave, a panic response if she ever saw one, when he stood, she swung a leg forward, disabling the bad leg again. Twice in five minutes, she used it against him. He fell mightily. 

Jyn was ready. She banded an arm around his throat, holding him in place. 

“I thought you wanted to talk about that night,” she rested her chin on his shoulder, but her proximity seemed to further upset him. “We’re  _ talking.” _

Chaos flowed through Cassian Andor. It was what he was good at. It was all he could navigate. Chaos that was not his fault. 

“What happened on that mission, Cassian?”

Jyn knew she was punching at a big, swollen kind of hurt, a pustule that would burst with the slightest pressure. Just as disgusting. 

“I did what I had to for the rebellion.”

“I read Moll’s mission log. She said you were ‘difficult’.”

“We lived together, so it was hard to hide. I didn’t want anyone to know...I just wanted it to be private.”

“Imagine how it feels when your worst injury is a gash across your face.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Jyn shrugged. “I got over it. I know you don’t like problems you can’t hide.”

She tried not to think about how easily their breathing had synced. She could feel it. A thousand little rises and falls

He lowered his hands from her arms, accepting the hold. 

“I’ve always done everything for the rebellion.”

“I get it, you’re a selfless bastard. If you think you will be nothing when this war is over,” Jyn said, holding him still. “What’s even the point in fighting anymore?”

He leaned his weight back against her. She could tell from the tension in his body. He didn’t like it, but he needed it.

“This is what war is, Jyn. The more questions you ask, the harder it gets.” 

“No, you fight in a war for there to be a better future. Eventually you have to leave that war behind when you succeed.”

“If we’d died on that beach, it would have been-”

_ “Perfect,” _ Jyn concluded, “I think that sometimes too. But we didn’t. Can’t it be enough that it meant what it did in the moment, and we were exactly what the other person needed?”

“That was  _ everything,” _ Cassian’s voice was gravelly. Like he was mourning something. 

Jyn loosened her grasp. He didn’t try to walk away.

“When we win this war, I want you to be there to see it.”

He placed his hand over hers, squeezing. “I can’t promise that.”

She pulled his hand away for a second, holding it tight to expose his wrist. 

Injuries inconsistent with those sustained in field work. Her stomach twisted. 

He whimpered, ripping his hand out of her grasp. He leaned forward, head bowed. 

She bit back tears. He was the best damn soldier she ever knew, and now this is what it did to him. A man and a child and a rebel. 

_ “Try harder.” _

“I can’t. I’m not strong like you are.”

Jyn set her teeth on edge. 

“Are you asking, Cassian.”

He trembled for a moment. 

“Cassian, is this asking?”

His head bowed forward.  _ “Yes.” _

“Then I can’t promise you won’t hate me by the time we see this war over.”

She pulled away. As she stood, he grabbed her wrist. 

“I never should have set you up for that mission. I wasn’t thinking. It was so fucking stupid and selfish, Jyn.” He pressed his brow to her hand.

Her thumb smoothed softly over his brow before she wrenched herself away. 

“I’ll forgive you if you  _ trust me.” _

She left him alone, struggling to stand on his new leg. He waited a very long time for something else to break the silence in the room, long after he was gone. Nothing else came. So after a few long minutes of trembling, an agonized cry ripped through him. 

He didn’t want to be weak anymore. 

 

Jyn didn’t want to re-read the mission logs. She read them anyway. 

She wasn’t sure why it was sinking so coldly into the pit of her gut. 

He was a spy. To her that was a smart, untouchable person that said all the right things and got into all the right places. She thought  _ she _ was his toughest mission, rounding her up, and Bodhi, and getting the audience with Saw. And that is had all just gone horribly wrong, and he was that person that said and did all the right things and that’s why they got out.

Jyn never thought about this. She never thought about it as biting back vomit as someone used your body. She thought about going through that mission with a stranger, if it had been her, and her mind found relief in replacing the stranger with Cassian. Not much, but enough. 

She knew what she had to do. What had been asked of her. And it would be the thing that would make him hate her. 

Kes was polishing his boots when Jyn came to his room. He raised his eyebrows, that charming face prepared for another one of her schemes. 

“What is it now?”

“I need an audience with the council.”

Kes smiled. “Asking for your promotion? About time.”

Jyn chewed her lower lip. 

“What kind of psychiatric care does the rebellion offer?”

Kes’s face fell. 

“We don’t have much to offer anyone right now,” he said, “What’s going on? Do you need to talk about it?”

Jyn shook her head, staring into the distance. She chewed her thumbnail. 

“Andor’s in pieces. I don’t feel safe knowing what I know about him and letting him walk around like that.”

“You don’t feel safe for yourself?”

She met his eyes with her severe, no-nonsense gaze. She shook her head. 

“I don’t feel safe for my conscience.”

She kept getting pieces of him. They had to mean something, instead of piling up around her like junk. Even if she wasn’t the one who could put him back together, maybe she could help carry him over to someone who could. 

Kes nodded, his face calm and understanding. 

“The council might not be able to do much, but I know someone who might.”

 

Jyn had never officially met the Princess. She felt the idea of being near royalty was terribly unsuited to her. So when Kes informed her Leia wanted to speak with her privately, she entered the war room with an uncomfortable case of nerves. 

Leia was seated, focused on her datapad. 

“Jyn Erso?”

Jyn had no official rank in the rebellion, so titling her was always some practice of mental gymnastics. She liked that Leia Organa just stuck with her name. 

“You had a request for psychiatric care for a friend?”

Her voice was official, but her brown eyes were warm. 

“Cassian Andor. I’m worried about that failed mission, and Scarif, and...probably a few years before that.”

Leia nodded, tapping the screen of her datapad. “I’ve asked around once your request was brought to me. A few people have observed he’s had the shakes, there’s been some unexplained injuries that led him to the medbay...I’m surprised you’re the first person to report this officially. There's obvious trauma that needs to be dissected professionally.”

“He’s the kind of person who seems like he can carry it all on his own. And he’ll feel weak if he doesn’t think that way too,” Jyn bit her lip, “And...it sounds like there’s not much to do once you report.” 

Leia nodded. 

“There’s not much the Alliance has in resources. I, however, take this kind of thing very seriously.”

Jyn had braced herself for the  _ “I wish there was something I could do”  _ talk. She fidgeted in her seat, still not trusting it wasn’t coming. 

“What can be done about it?”

Leia nodded, all business, but with a warmth and sensitivity Jyn never would have assigned to a princess. “I have a few friends who work very closely in this kind of trauma. I called in a few favors. They’ll be on base in a few days. There's a few other names who need to be added to this list of patients, but Andor is high ranking enough that it's the push we needed. The next step is to inform Captain Andor that this counseling is not optional.”

Jyn's hands formed into tight fists. She wasn't sure it was really happening. 

“He’ll comply. He loves the rebellion too much to let it go.”

“Well, he’s too valuable to lose.”

Leia’s spin on it was tactful. It had to be. The council would need to accept it. Jyn tried to take that as a compliment, and not a statement that made Cassian further powerless in what was best for him. He really was going to kill her when he found out. 

“Do you think I did the right thing?” Jyn slipped for a moment, chewing her thumbnail between her teeth.

Leia softened for a moment. “I have a feeling that this was your last resort.”

Jyn nodded. 

“I also have a feeling that he’s going to be okay, Jyn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DIDN’T THINK CARRIE FISHER WAS GOING TO SWOOP IN SAVE THE DAY, DID YOU?
> 
> The writing process of this chapter was just holding Cassian’s head in a bucket of water and messaging half my fandom friends “can I let him out yet?” and they’d reply “yes, oh my god, why is his head in a bucket?” and I’d be all “eh he can stay in there for a few more minutes it’s fine”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *the writing process for this entire story has just been listening to Last Hope by Paramore and trying not to have a panic attack*

Jyn didn’t have to wait long to find out how Cassian would react. He found her.

She was waiting for Bodhi to join her for lunch and he appeared from the main entrance of the mess hall and was walking a straight, determined path right towards her. He did not look happy. He must have just found out, based on the rage in his eyes, wound tight and betrayed.

He didn’t stop until he was standing across the table from her, hands slamming onto the table. She lifted her fork to her mouth, eyebrows raised. The most surprising thing about it was he didn’t seem to mind being seen with her in public, or even being seen publicly fighting with her.

His face was the same withdrawn rage she’d seen on him when they were strangers, covered in rain and opposition to each other.

“Why, Jyn?”

Her eye slid below his gaze, staring at some point over his shoulder.

“You asked me for help and I gave it to you.”

He was holding his breath. He’d been upset with her before, but she’d never seen him this angry.

“You reported me to my superior officers, this could have cost me my position in the rebellion.”

She wanted to say _good,_ because it was killing him.

“You asked for help, and I gave it to you. You don’t have to like me for it.”

Her fork pinned into her food. Her other arm was folded across the table, hand wedged into her opposite elbow. She didn’t like that he was standing, but didn’t want to escalate things further by rising to get close to his face.

She knew how intensely private he was. That this argument was going to come up. But she couldn’t sustain this, him crashing into her and shaking the painstaking efforts she was making to move on. “Was I supposed to set aside my time to taking care of you? Meet you in the training gym so we could talk about our feelings? I helped, Cassian, now my hands are off this whole thing. I did what I had to.”

Cassian looked stricken, and the depth of what he had asked her for only now seemed to occur to him. Even if he hated her for it, she would do the right thing.

She would take his blame if she had to. Her conscience was clear.

Bodhi slid into the seat beside her, his face cautious.

“Everything alright?”

Cassian’s lips were thin, holding in what was an outcry of rage not specifically at Jyn, but in built up grief and now humiliation. She tried to keep her expression firm, but not judging.

“Do you still trust me?”

She saw him swallow. He wanted to tell her more, but Bodhi was watching, a protective hand on Jyn’s arm.

He nodded.

Jyn’s lips twitched in a reluctant smile.

“If you had wanted someone to know, and just sit back with that knowledge locked away while you still hurt yourself, you wouldn’t have asked me.”

She slid a hand across the table, hesitantly, touched her fingers to the back of his hand.

He stared at her skin touching his.

“Remind me to thank you someday,” he said flatly, withdrawing his hand and vanishing.

She stared at her empty hand, wondering what looked wrong about it after he walked away.

 

The next few weeks are a chaotic stir in the relocation to Echo Base, she lost track of Cassian and could only pray for the best between being outfitted for snow gear and trying to figure out a place in the new layout that would allow for a class that students could work out in and not freeze. She was faintly regretful she couldn’t knock on the door of his quarters, lean in the doorway and discuss the best way of planning training sessions on an ice planet, being from Fest. She was sure he’d be a great deal of help, if they ever got to that place.

She checked in with Leia, who was supportive but secretive about Cassian’s counseling.

“You reported it, everything else is between him and his therapist. If he chooses to go to these sessions, he will be on the road to recovery. That’s up to Cassian now.”

Jyn tried not to grimace, because Leia had done nothing but help, but that seemed a pretty bleak status update.

Jyn went back to trying to be the intensely impersonal person she was before, but caring for others had become a void she had been sucked into, and she couldn’t isolate herself from the depths of her friends.

Kes told her, eyes shining and proud, that he was going to be a father.

She was breathless a moment, not sure if she should grieve or panic in the moment, but happiness _vibrated_ through him. She didn’t know Shara and Kes were that close yet, but he very rarely spoke to her about Shara.

She realized that no one spoke that closely to her about romantic relationships; tactfully so. It wounded her more than she thought it would, that everyone hid their happiness from her for so long because they didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She’d caught Bodhi before numerous times with freshly kissed lips, eyes dreamy and a little more that dazed, but he shrugged off her questions. Babies and love, like they were triggers to her; impossible things.

Spiteful, she remembered the last time she tried to pursue even the thinnest sliver of those things, the night ended sobbing on a com link with Chirrut and Baze, who kept their own updates pleasant but vague when she tried to pry into their happiness.

She hugged Kes, trying to prove she could be told these things again. Jyn’s heart had cooled to a cleansing, anointing ash.

“You can be an Auntie,” Kes promised.

Jyn laughed, squeezing tighter. “I can’t wait.”

Maybe she was never meant to be a lover; but she would be an auntie, and that’s what she would take for now, because in an imperial prison she had no hopes of any of those things.

At meals, Shara became a more open presence, sitting with her and Kes and Bodhi. Jyn’s guarded heart quickly had room for more, gravitating towards feminine strength she had been deprived of as she passed from keeper to keeper. Shara mentioned she saw Kalonia for morning sickness, so Jyn started tagging along to these infirmary dashes, a useless but welcome presence as Shara complained about swelling in her ankles as Harter nodded intently.

She tried not to feel hurt when she passed Cassian the first few times on Echo Base, since he had gone back to being unable to look at her. 

 

Returning from a particularly dangerous mission, she was surprised to see that the whole team had attracted an entourage waiting to greet them. Anyone following their updates in real time wasn’t sure if they’d ever come back, so many were there to see them return. For Han Solo, a peeved Leia. But for the rest of the crew, a naturally concerned group came to connect with those they’d almost lost. Luke Skywalker caught Bodhi by the arm, as though trying to read any pain in his body. The pilot shook his head, smiling.

Shara pounced on Kes, both happy and pissed to see him, because there had been more than one close call for almost everyone involved. It had gotten so bad, that even Lisbon, who avoided eye contact with Jyn when crewed together and seemed panicky in situations where he was forced to be within ten feet of her, had looked her dead in the eye on the way home and said the simple statement “I thought we were done for.” It was an inclusive _we_. It felt nice to hear, even from him.

The crowd cleared for Jyn. She understood. Most of her people were on this mission with her, and the rest were enjoying Han get an earful from Leia, who’s usual composure was ruffled beyond belief. She was actually grateful for the occasional nod or hand on her shoulder from people who attended her class. She didn’t need some little wife launching into her arms, but she felt appreciated. She just wanted a shower and to go to sleep.

The crowd parted, and at its edge, she saw Cassian waiting on the fringe, arms crossed, hidden mostly by shadow. He stirred closer, into the light, at the sight of her.

Jyn had a wide spot of dried blood on her shirt, the wound had closed and ached a little, but it was nothing in the grand scheme of the trauma she had put her body through. Some bruises. Some burns. But what else was she but a body holding all of those things?

His eyes flashed with concern, and he did step into the track of her path, but he didn’t seem as sure of himself compared to all the times he razored her out of a crowd. She kept her head down, but there was part of her…

When she passed him, she caught the inside of his arm in her hand, right above his elbow. His sleeve was rolled to that point, and the bare fingers extended out of her flight gloves touched his soft skin. Gave it a quick squeeze.

_I’m still here._

She kept walking, but she saw him un-tense out of the corner of her eye, slipping back into the shadows.

She recounted the exchange to Kalonia as she was getting patched up, rolling her eyes and huffing at her own weakness, to which Harter smiled mildly.

“Maybe you two can be friends someday,” the nurse said in a clipped, chipper manner, slapping a bacta patch on Jyn so quickly that her disgusted response died into a sharp, indignant cry.

“After all we’ve done to each other…”

“I can think of no better reason than all you’ve done. You got him into therapy, didn’t you?”

Jyn pursed her lips, adjusting her own eyepatch with a sleepy hand. “I assumed he wasn’t going anymore.”

Harter’s mouth twitched. Jyn had gotten good at her hints, because she wasn’t allowed to disclose a lot of classified information.

 _“He is not,”_ Jyn’s mouth fell open.

“Every week. Right on time.”

Jyn chewed on her thumbnail. “I don’t believe you.”

Harter shrugged. “I’m not saying he’s magically better, but he’s getting help.”

“You don’t get to place him at the finish line for taking the first step.”

“But he’s closer, because he _showed up to begin with.”_

 

When Leia was done with Han, the smuggler was stunned to see Captain Andor approach, who he had maybe exchanged ten words with before that evening. Looking even angrier with him than the princess had. 

"How was she, during that mission?"

Han tried to scroll through the list of names on the roster. Then he remembered Erso, the only one of note when it came to the captain. The sarcastic little shit. Andor was always staring at her when her back was turned. 

"She got a couple of blaster wounds. She's okay. You saw her, she's scraped up, but she's fine."

That was clearly not enough for the captain.

"You take _care of her."_ Cassian's voice was fire, "nothing happens to her on your watch, do you understand?"

Han held up his hands, looking incredulous. "Sure, fine. I'll look out for your little girlfriend."

"She's her own person," Cassian corrected, turning his back on the exchange like a hit and run.

Cassian stalked away, his breath even and shallow out of his nose. Maybe therapy was working. A month ago, he definitely would have punched that smuggler in the face to punctuate the threat. 

 

It seemed like everyone forgot about Jyn’s eye. The patch melded into the geography of her face, just a part of her as her messy hair and scowl, especially since so few people really knew what she looked like before her disfigurement. The wild stories softened into part of her lore, as someone who couldn’t take much seriously, even in the gravest of situations her spark would ignite.

So while drinking a week after their return, Han was the first person to directly bring it up in ages. He had been holding court in one of the makeshift bars on base, which was a storage space with some chairs thrown around more than anything else. A game of sabacc had ended in that usual smack-talk between the smuggler and the rebel. They had created a tentative friendship, bonded over the shady dealings of their past and Han's inexplicable newfound protective streak towards her.

She’d been unexpectedly happy to see Cassian join the festivities, tentative and mostly quiet.

“What’s the real story of how you lost your eye, Erso?”

Jyn smirked. “Sandpeople ate it. Don’t you remember?”

Han Solo had a wicked sense of humor that melded well into Jyn’s ability to relax with sarcasm and ironic smiles. Kes allowed her to perform, Han allowed her to be lazy. Neither man was hers, she’d be daft to think so, but both allowed her moments to be with them in an act of selfless camaraderie, never denying, always supporting. Kes's baby's Auntie, Han's reluctant copilot. 

She saw, out of the corner of her good eye, Cassian stir uncomfortably in his seat. She remembered the sour looks on his face when she told it before, casting villains and mythology to the simple story of a head being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe he hated those stories because it felt like someone needed to take the blame.

Maybe there was one more thing she could give Cassian.

“I was in an imperial prison, more than sure I was going to die there…”  

And she leaned forward in her seat, drawing the crowd to shift close for the Best Story Yet, because it was the true one. The ironic, dashing smile was gone from her face, her eye bright and righteous instead. A hush fell over the room.

His eyes set on her. She could feel his breathlessness, realized she was scared too. That she’d told this story selfishly, but this, this was for them.

Jyn told the story of Rogue One. Her heart but fast but sure as she recounted meeting Cassian, and Baze and Chirrut, and Bodhi, and K2’s snark. She wasn’t sure if she was putting the story together correctly, so she occasional cast a nervous glance to Cassian. He would merely nod, the only indication she was making the words fits. His eyes seemed to urge her on. 

“And Andor and I were on that citadel, and we knew there was no way out of it. So instead of skewering Krennic, this romantic bastard decides we should watch the sunset on the beach,” she smiled, in spite of herself. “We had a nice talk.”

“About what?” is the first interruption, by one of her younger students. She shook her head, unable to find the words.

_Your father would have been proud of you._

Cassian had been the first person in the rebellion to forgive Galen Erso. Maybe the only one.

She couldn’t look at him, but she could feel his gaze like some kind of warmth. Maybe this was the only way left to talk about it. To absolve his spirit, the way he had hers on that beach.

“That’s private,” she said with a weak smile, managing a laugh at the groans that filled the room. “I think that’s when he stopped being miserable he was stuck with me. Or that feeling doubled, considering where we were. We were so close to frying that the explosion took my eye. I was so focused on not having to look at it coming I didn’t realize I was taking the brunt of it. We were dead anyway, really, so who was keeping track? But we didn’t die.”

She braved another look at Cassian, who was still holding his breath.

“We did it,” she said, the empathy in her eye she used to hide so well now sparkling with life and gratitude. “It would have been an honor to die with Cassian Andor. But we lived.”

She held up her glass in Cassian’s direction, tipping it to denote a toast. Han whistled.

“I’ll drink to that.”

He clapped the small rebel on the back a few times. The conversation waned in a gradual sort of way, the evening growing to a close. Han told her about his closest place to death, and she listened, surprised by how genuine his story was, the ghost of it in his eyes. Maybe everyone needed someone to talk to. Her feet propped up on an empty chair, getting comfortable compared to the many preparing to turn in for the night. Cassian still kept his distance.

Han made his excuses, his face that rare mix of wry and grim, nodding his goodnight to his newest partner. Jyn smacked his ass as he passed her by.

The room emptied, but Jyn knew to stay, until there was only one more person in the room. He rose from his chair after a few moments of silence.

Cassian took a shaky breath, pulled out the chair next to her. She raised her eyebrows, but he waved off her pending question, sliding a bottle across the table towards them. He poured two full drinks.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago. I’m pouring you a drink. We’re going to have a drink together, Jyn, because I want to honor what I have been through with my fellow soldier.”

She clicked her glass against the one in his hand, accepting his offer in a shy toast.

“Took you long enough.”

He nodded solemnly. “Too long.”

They didn’t drink quickly, and they didn’t talk much. His hand casually splayed over the back of her chair. She rest her chin in her hand, propped on the table.

She remembered her parents, at the kitchen table some nights when she was supposed to be asleep. She snuck glances, because them talking together, so relaxed and tired, made her feel safe. Usually they worried. But sometimes, they just sat there, not saying anything of consequence, tired and happy. She wasn’t sure that was the emotion she was feeling, or if she and Cassian had anything in common to them, but the drink was nice.

“I have sources who tell me you haven’t missed a session yet,” she said conversationally.

He topped off his glass, raising an eyebrow at her. “Well that depends on how accurate your sources are.”

She raised her eyebrows, expectant.

He sighed, rubbed the back of his head. “It’s what you asked of me.”

“You’re just going _for me?”_

He shot her a pointed look. _Haven’t we proven how much I would do for you?_

“I have to go, Leia Organa mandated it,” he leaned back, withdrew his arm, shrugged. Looked at the glass in his hand. “But there are ways I could get around it. I still go for you.”

She sighed. He cracked the smallest smile.

“What?”

“I’d rather you do this for yourself, and take it seriously.”

He refilled her glass too.

“Sometimes there’s just no pleasing you,” but there was a spark in his eyes when he said it. Weak, but still there. “I’m beyond deserving much more than I got on that mission a long time ago. I’ll always be a bastard outrunning death.”

“You let it get too close.”

“Just to remind myself it’s always there.”

Jyn picked up her glass, didn’t touch it to her lips.

“What Moll did to you…”

His guard, lowered seemingly so easily, shot back up. “I did what I had to for the rebellion. I couldn’t say no.”

“There’s a word for that.”

His mouth sealed closed. Jyn took a sip to stall that clearly she had to carry this conversation now.

“Do you talk about that, specifically?”

He shook his head.

“You need to. You have to.”

He shrugged, clearly trying to block to topic entirely.

She stood up. Hesitated. Placed her hand on his shoulder. “I don’t care what you do these things for. But if you’re doing them for me, you need to talk to someone about what I read on those mission reports.”

He didn’t say anything, but he placed a hand over hers. Squeezed the fingers.

Nodded to himself as she walked out of the room.

Placed his head in his hands and cried until his shoulders shook once her absence was felt. He had never heard her version of the end before. What happened on Scarif. He hadn’t remembered it for what it was in so long. The moment in which he had never been closer to another person. It wasn’t enough to save him. But it was a feeling worth saving himself to try his best to have again.

He was an idiot for not begging for her kiss on that elevator, when he had the chance. For not begging every day since he met her. Before it was too late.  

 

She found Cassian in a back room of the infirmary one night, in passing, covered in snow and his false leg fully detached. A remedy for stretch marks floated through her head, as Kalonia had just been instructing Shara, and the list grew more and more disgusting until Jyn excused herself. The door was only just cracked enough to see him, from a distance, and she watched far before she processed what she was doing.

She’d never seen the limb removed before, the empty pant leg that made it clear what he was missing. He must have just gotten back from outside base, there was ice in his hair that hadn’t melted. His hands were the vibrant pink of someone only now getting a returning blood flow. He hissed his breath into cupped hands, trying to warm them.

There was frost on the metal brace that went around his thigh. That had to be painful. He had opened his coat and pressed it to his chest to warm it up before returning it to his stump, but there couldn’t be much warmth to spare from his body, and none of it should be leeched onto metal before his body temperature regulated.

He heard her before he saw her, so he tried to slam the door shut as she grew close. She wedged a foot in the door.

He glanced up at her, fear waning into an irritation at her stubbornness.

“You alright?” she asked, worried as he held the limb in his hands.

He nodded. “It...constricts when it gets cold,” he replied tensely.

He pressed the metal closer, squinting his eyes for a moment. He shivered. Pained, she grabbed it from him, holding it to her own body heat.

She saw panic flash across his face when she pulled it away. Panic that made her reach out her hand to touch his empty one, fingers against his palm.

“I’m warmer than you are right now,” she explained, staring at the floor. She loosened her grip, allowing him the chance to grab it back, 

She listened to him breathing. His eyes were wide, scared that she might use the limb to bludgeon him or something. He fidgeted, not sure how to sit there as she knelt on the floor in front of him as the place the fake limb connected to his body was cradled against hers. She didn’t know what to do now that she was there.

“How are you?” she said tensely.

He looked incredulous. “Are we talking about our feelings?”

She shrugged, as least as much as she could with a fake leg between her arms and breasts. She had to warm it one way or another.

“We don’t have to.”

 _They did,_ but it was almost funny that she decided to make allowances.

He let out a breath full of irony. Her eye flit over his body, the language of it longing for an escape.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s just,” he looked at his hands, “I get anxious when someone else handles the prosthetic. Moll used to...take it. Sometimes.”

“Take it?”

“Hide it, so I…”

She saw his throat contort, choking back. He couldn’t say it out loud.

Jyn let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her hand slapped over her mouth, a noise she’d never made before escaping her lips. That was the worst thing she had ever heard. She pressed her face to his knee, the real one, cupping the back of it to keep her touch fierce. His hand wove into her hair.

“I’m sorry.”

Tears pricked her eye.

His hand flinched in her hair, pressed closer along the curve of her skull protectively.

“It’s not your fault.”

She chewed the inside of her mouth, trying very hard not to think about how vulnerable he looked now, without the spare leg, and Moll being in her shoes, and…

She shut her eye.

“Please tell me you talk about this with someone. Anyone. Even if you don’t use the means Leia provided.”

His hand fanned across her shoulder, cautious.

“I can’t just...give these feelings away, Jyn. They’ll always be a part of me.”

“They’ll fade,” she promised, trying to help him by rolling up the pant leg, offering him his prosthetic back. He flinched away. “You can have a life after this, I know you can.”

“I don’t- _don’t.”_ he said with finality, slapping a hand over the one she had working up the fabric. She hadn’t reached the point of the injury yet, but it was clear he didn’t want her to. “Please don’t.”

Jyn lifted her hands, breathless, as he covered his mouth with his hand. She just kept her palms up where he could see them, not touching him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her.

She shook her head. She couldn’t look either. “Don’t be.”

The ice in his hair had begun to melt. She’d stayed too long.

Jyn stood, her eye on the floor. She wanted to leave, but rushing out seemed rude, leaving him like he was the problem. The problem was bigger than him.

“When I said I didn’t want you to use me to hurt yourself?” her weight shifted from foot to foot. She chewed her thumbnail, wincing as cuticle tore. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself at all, alright? I never wished for that.”

He finally looked at her, “I know. You’re not that kind of person.”

She nodded, unable to return his gaze.

“I should go,” and she was gone in the time it took to say the words.

As he returned the limb to his body, the warmth of her still lingered pleasantly, like the phantom feel of her skin.

It felt so familiar it took a while for him to realize he’d never experienced it enough to miss. He was so sure that he had. Could he miss something that was never his.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is in sight. It's going to be okay. You're all going to have to hold my hands as I land this thing. The reader base of this story has been the kindest, most supportive group I have ever had in any fandom, and I am continually blessed by your strength. All my love. 
> 
> -Madeleine


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of you who are usually late for work because of these updates -read this chapter after work, it's too fucking long and you know you're going to be late, so don't blame me this time, I warned you-
> 
> Sensitive subject warning: there is one line in particular that dives into the psyche of a sexual abuse victim in an accurate but dark way. If you want a little warning first, you can message me at my tumblr lyresandlasers and I can unpack what it is as gently as possible and you can decide for yourself if it's something that would be too upsetting.

The war was changing. There was traction that they’d never hoped for before.

Jyn re-submitted her name for missions. Mon Mothma was pleased by the show in patriotism. Jyn’s classes had a scattered schedule for when she was home, her ship usually hounded upon landing by her students -at this point a collection of teenagers- clamoring for when they should meet her in the training room.

She kept them busy, barking orders when she was once brought back with a broken ankle. She had to teach through the pain, grumpy because she was grounded until cleared for field work again, only when she just started wanting it. She paced the training room on crutches with a terrifying speed, barking orders and swinging a crutch threateningly to people who talked back. She was more fearsome when injured.

Cassian took over the role of delivering the key that Jyn had to fetch from Draven every night. But seeing her navigate on crutches to his quarters, he looked disgusted by the formality and expression of a severe lack of trust to her on the rebellion’s part, slipping the override key on a dog tag around his neck over his head and pressing it into her hand.

“Don’t worry about bringing it back,” he whispered, “but don’t tell anyone I’m letting you do this.”

She raised her eyebrows to let him know how unnecessary it was to ask her not to talk about the fact she was getting away with something. His eyes cautiously watched her sway on the crutches.

“Take one breath longer than you think you need before you take your first step,” he advised, nodding to her bad ankle.

She wanted to thank him but he vanished into the dark of his room too quickly. Even at the place where he was, he gave her a coping mechanism he felt worked well enough to share. That was something.

She kept the advice on her mind even after she healed, and it helped her feel better even without a broken ankle.

 

Cassian met with Mothma privately, the same formal Captain he was before, but with a voice half the volume of what it used to be, declaring that the remnants of Rogue One would be best used as a team together.

Jyn and Bodhi rejoiced at being crewed together, Cassian’s presence not an unwelcome one as they helped board supplies onto the ship. Jyn had begged Bodhi to just trust her and let the fighting with Cassian go, and because he was Bodhi, he was more than ready to do just that.

The close proximity was tense, especially with Cassian so self-conscious after the night in the med bay. But at meals, he would silently seat himself across from her, a bold statement from him. She was still shocked to look up and see him there, chewing, staring at his tray.

She was just happy to see him eating. She was sickened by knowing the exact shape of his bones under his skin for so long.

They both took their shift piloting together, a painful night shift while everyone else slept. She’d let him nap while she watched the controls, and he would more often then not let her get away with sleeping the entire time, so she couldn’t trust him to wake her up when he was supposed to.

“I know you let me sleep longer than you should, too,” he would point out, tampering with the navigation as he spoke smoothly, and she would chew her thumbnail, unable to properly rebuke the claim.

She hissed when she caught him adjusting his leg one night, his thigh having gone numb from sitting so long. His face was tensed with pain.

“How is it?” she murmured, not moving, not looking at him, like she could spook him. He went still.

“It is what it is,” he shrugged. She could tell it was more than he was letting on.

“How has...talking about it been?”

He sighed. “They want to put me on medication, for some of the...extremes.”

She nodded. “I think that may be a good idea.”

He glared at her. “I want to have control, Jyn.”

She didn’t want to ask him to do it for her. Any more and it would feel like using, like owing him someday.

“You’re right,” she compromised, “But I think they’re worth trying. At least to see how you react to them. And if you feel like they’re making you give up something you don’t want to sacrifice, stop.”

He glanced back at her, surprised.

“I’ll...I’ll think about it.”

They were both gunners for the takedown of an Imperial Fleet, and the surge of emotion that took place over their coms was triumphant and a little melancholy.

 _Look how well we work together,_ she wanted to tell him, just to make him feel as good as the realization made her feel.

They had a pleasant retreat, victorious. From the pilot’s seats, they watched the battlefield in the stars surrounding them with a quiet awe. They had seen Imperial ships go up in flames, one by one. Jyn gripped his hand, because at some point, the scale was too massive to ignore.

Her eye was vibrant with the unspoken words. _I think we’re winning._

He nodded back at her, squeezing tightly.

The mission was a quiet success.

Cassian still joined her for meals on base, something that stunned Kes and Shara, but they didn’t ask questions (Cassian’s diet was lighter than it should have been, but he did give the food he didn’t eat to a very pregnant Shara, which endeared him to her very quickly). Jyn neatly informed K2 that Cassian was now at lunch everyday, and the irony of a droid never missing a meal was not lost on the rebellion as an audience. The droid was there every day, one seat diagonal from Jyn, waiting for Cassian to slide his tray down across from her, take a seat, and quietly talk shop about the missions for the week.

She noticed his sharp reactions had dulled. The edges were worn down.

She raised her eyebrows at him, nothing the change. _Is it...?_

He nodded, only noticeable to someone looking for a response from him.

Part of her worried, because it meant less Cassian.

But she remembered her numbness, the first year after Scarif. How the extremes waned into a quiet, ever-present ache, just by powering through them.

Maybe if he could manage the more contained feelings, like she had done, things would be more stable when he was completely himself again.

She worried about it to Kalonia, who finally broke an unspoken boundary they had set and took Jyn’s hands in hers.

“A doctor prescribed medicine for him, Jyn. He’s healing right now. How you feel about it isn’t going to do much better for him, so let the doctor do his job.”

Jyn let go of the subject. So she hadn’t needed medication. She wasn’t Cassian. She couldn’t pretend to know what he was feeling.

 

After Poe was born, Jyn’s world stopped. It snuck up on everyone, especially her.

She was quiet about it the first few months, to the point where no one noticed exactly when Jyn became Poe’s favorite person. When he was in the room with her, she would be silent, her eye constantly trained on his round face. He would stare back.

Shara, picking up on this only when the post-natal chaos started to wind down, finally asked if Jyn wanted to hold him after weeks of silently staring at him in Kes or her laps.

She agreed, but didn’t seem like she _needed_ to do it.

After that, he was nearly always on her lap, yanking on the locks of hair that hung down past her chin, having escaped her bun. She didn’t even do much with him, just sort of stared into those large, nearly whiteless eyes, smiling in a self-conscious way if he smiled first.

Every time he cried, the consensus was “give him to Jyn,” that even his parents agreed with. It wasn’t that she had all the tricks to getting him to stop, Bodhi was technically better with Poe and quieting babies in general, but she just weathered it more patiently than anyone else. Her anxiety at this point in her life was hard to aggravate; so she mostly just sat there while he screamed and let him feel his feelings without starting to scream too. As new parents, Kes and Shara were glad to leave her to it sometimes.

“You are so small,” she would marvel, his entire hand wrapped around her finger,and that was about as sentimental as she got with him, which was fine with Poe.

One afternoon Shara needed a rest, so Jyn offered to run Poe over to his father for his brief lunch break.

Her students jeered at her and her newfound softness as she walked passed, all teasing aggressively good-natured as it was like watching an older sister becoming a mother herself. Jyn regularly maintained that her love for Poe was because he was not hers, and at the end of the day, she could pass him over to his real parents and never have to change a diaper.

So she looked as official as possible, face trained to cool indifference, as Poe tugged on her hair, gurgling.

She passed Cassian and gave him a nod in greeting. Things were still on unexplored ground between them on non-professional matters since the night she saw him without his leg; it was very intimate, an intimacy Jyn did not feel she had earned. He stooped to the ground after she passed, wincing as he bowed low. He held up a small, fuzzy square of fabric.

“You dropped this,” his neck tightened as he stood, holding back a groan, “Well, _he_ dropped this.”

She braced Poe’s head as she spun to face Cassian, stroking the soft down on his already full head of black hair.

She held out her free arm as Cassian’s balance wobbled, as though she could collect him into her arms along with the baby she was already holding. He clasped her elbow reassuring, shaking her attempt off.

“Have you met Poe yet?” she tried, bouncing him on her hip slightly. Poe did wonderful things for her moods, maybe it would help him.

Cassian drew closer, but only slightly, and Poe was pretty tempting bait. “From a distance. With his parents, he’s a little celebrity. Already breaking hearts.”

Poe seemed to sense an anxiety in the captain, because he immediately grew fussy. Jyn had to bosom him closer, shrugging apologetically at Cassian.

“A rebellion baby,” she said distractedly, a filler for real conversation, but Cassian’s face closed off.

“Poor kid,” he mused.

Jyn’s gaze whipped from Poe to Cassian in an instant. He had kept his disappointment casual, but she already saw the signs of him shutting down, the way his gaze collapsed backwards into his head.

“He’ll grow up never knowing the evils of the Empire,” she said firmly. “We’ll make sure of that.”

Cassian’s returning smile was sad.

“You’ll be a good mother,” he said with a sense of finality that made her itch. Like he was wishing something on her just because he himself could never have it.

“No, my babies wouldn’t be Poe, so why even try,” she rocked her favorite Dameron gently, trying to buy another minute with Cassian before the screams started, “I like being an Auntie. I don’t think I want that…mess.” she shook her head.

Cassian nodded, his eyes now examining her instead of escaping her.

“I just don’t think I’ve seen you so at peace before…”

He sounded envious, and a little longing.

Poe shrieked, and Cassian’s face went pale. It was an unnatural sound for so little a being. Jyn tucked his face close, shaking her head apologetically, “He wants to see his father.”

Cassian nodded, draping the dropped blanket over her shoulder as he passed. She watched him take that extra breath before his first step. 

The vision of her tentative smile down on that little face didn’t leave as quickly as he hoped it would.

 

“Kes and I were saying Jyn should work with children,” Shara declared, Poe tucked to her breast. Kes was usually busy for the night feeding and Shara got bored, so the three women chose the privacy of Kalonia’s wing for an early evening talk as Poe nursed.

Harter was rolling bandages, her brows raised. She lifted her gaze to Jyn, who was fidgeting on the examination table, where she technically was not supposed to sit, but that rule had been bent so many times they lost track of when Jyn forgot to listen and Harter stopped caring to ask.

“That sounds a little grim, with the education set up by the rebellion.”

Jyn shook her head. “Not now. Not here. _After.”_

The word left her breathless. Like it was an impossible idea until now. The presence of Luke Skywalker and his work with Leia had surged new life into the rebellion, new hope, and there would be an end to all of this, someday.

Harter’s smile was thin, just as tentative as she returned it to Jyn.

“So you have been thinking about it?” Shara asked smugly, sharing a private smile with a fussing Poe.

Jyn shrugged. “I’ll need to find something to do with myself, when I’m not living off of the rebellion’s charity.”

Shara shook her head. “You’ve done enough for the rebellion, don’t even pretend you’re still an outsider.”

Harter smiled to herself at the flush on Jyn’s cheeks at those words.

Jyn wasn’t sure when that had become true, but the harder she searched her mind, she realized it was.

 

That loneliness that overwhelmed her when Cassian was gone returned with a melancholy sting. She’d tried the one-night-stand, and that was a bitterly failed experiment. She missed being touched, however misguidedly, to the point where it felt like she was lying dormant. The daily use of her body as an extension of violence, a machine to the rebellion made her bitter, especially when Cassian attended her classes, never participating, but observing.

She’d waited until Cassian faded from a placeholder, and instead his ability to be that was wrenched away from her in disgust when she considered what he’d been through.

So instead she was left wondering what _anything_ would feel like.

She’d goaded a drunken Bodhi into kissing her a few times, and she loved kissing Bodhi, but it felt exactly like it was; her best friend. It was a silly thing because a kiss was such a strange currency during war, people were stingier with them. So it was a treat to pull Bodhi to her by his shirt and work her lips against his full, pretty ones, both of the laughing into each other’s mouths because it was slightly ridiculous.

Good fun, was what it was.

But Jyn hadn’t had anyone touch her in a different way in a long time. Even Cassian’s trained hands on her, on that horrible night, were a knowing display of their argument, not anything savory.

She tried. She returned wry smiles. Did the usual tricks, the way she tried to swirl the energy around herself so it was taut, snagging the eye of someone from across a bar.

But then someone would sit down, and look at her, and she would shy away because it didn’t feel right.

Feeling right was not a pre-rebellion concern of hers. She did things anyway.

She tried kissing other people that she trusted less, and it made her body tense up like there was ice against her skin.

It was like her mind colonized her body, and when she became aware of that, she became increasingly nauseous that Moll had colonized Cassian’s. Understanding his feelings made her ache with empathy, trying to drown them with the hope that sex could be good again. She would be living proof, and promise him he would feel that someday too.

So she was trying. Trying. With an ache of loneliness that Kes and Shara, and Bodhi, and even Poe, could not fill.

She spent the evening kissing someone who was _not_ a student, which she was pretty proud of because she wouldn’t dream of trying that again, no matter how old they were. He tried to remove her shirt, she tensed up, the mood was killed. She was grateful he was good enough to put an end to things as soon as her interest was clearly not in going further.

She left his room, feeling defeated. Not guilty, but disappointed in herself for what she couldn’t _give_ herself.

Jyn was left with a hollow feeling after the doors closed behind her. She made it a few halls away from his bunk, arms crossed defensively over her chest, before flopping her back onto the wall and covering her face.

Trying hurt a lot.

A hand curled around her elbow.

“Are you alright?”

She lifted her hands from her face. Cassian stared back, his dark eyes concerned. She wanted to press her thumb to the knot that formed at his brow when he worried.

“Yes,” her voice cracked, _“yes._ I just… left someone’s room. I wasn’t, I just-”

She felt an anger surround her that she hadn’t known from him before. Warm, intense, trying to drag her into the core of him to hold for safekeeping.

“Did something happen.”

“No,” she covered her mouth, trying to find the words “I just left because I wasn’t feeling it.”

“Where they trying to force you to do somethi-”

She scrunched her face up in a cringe, shaking her head.

He misunderstood. His hand flinched up, smacked the side of his own face. Hard. It startled a cry from her lips, and she grabbed his hands, holding them down.

“No, force, no, Cassian, _stop,”_ she actually put her arms around him because he was shaking. “It wasn’t like that. Two consenting adults, just, I wasn’t ready.”

He pressed his brow to her shoulder, protective arms curling around her body.

“Ready for what?”

“Just...ready. I don’t… I haven’t in awhile.”

He nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“But I want to, and I can’t really connect with someone when…”

_When we’ve already been through everything._

He stroked her back, going from ready to murder someone to tenderness with an eerily subtle grace.

“I just feel like a failure,” she admitted, “when it’s so easy for everyone else.”

“You will find someone who will make you happy,” he said, confident. She wanted to melt into that reassuring hold he had on her.

“What about you?”

He flinched. All that confidence was so easily shaken when she turned the tables on him.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you trying? To find someone else?”

He pulled away. He sincerely looked hurt.

“Jyn…”

All this talk of her moving on and he was so damn _offended_ when she implied the same for him.

“You don’t deserve any less than me,” she shot back.

He chewed the inside of his mouth. Took deep breaths. Leaned close.

“Sometimes, the only way I could cum was when I would think about Moll smashing my skull open. So I wouldn’t have to face what happened to me when it was over. Let’s find someone to deal with that, shall we?”

Jyn let out a sob, but he shrugged off the hand she reached for him.

What he was giving her was hard to face, but it wasn’t startled out of him like an animal reacting on fight or flight. It was controlled. Cassian was finally, _finally,_ in control of himself, and told her the truth, and the truth was simply terrible.

Things now all depended on her ability to hear the truth.

“I have learned to live with less, Jyn, because it’s all I can manage right now. You’re further ahead. That’s alright. Don’t handicap yourself so I can catch up.”

He squeezed her hand before letting go.

She pressed her hand to his stinging cheek. It was red, warm under her palm.

“What did I say about hurting yourself?” she protested weakly.

Jyn wished she could hold him, but he presented the information to her the way he wanted, and retreated to privacy. So that was his comfort.

His hands secured around her wrist, holding it in place, then taking it away.

“If what happened to me happened to you, I…”

She shook her head. “I don’t want you to tell me what you’d do. I don’t want you to _think_ about it. I would avenge myself, and you would help me heal. Understood?”

He bit his lower lip. His eyes cast down to the floor.

He nodded.

But he would probably destroy what was left of anyone who crossed Jyn. After she got there first.

For the first time it really hit her that Cassian was probably not going to get better enough for things to...resume. Her heart split in a new way, healed as it was, not along the usually weakly repaired seam but a whole new, clean break.

This was how he told her. With as much as his blessing he could give. She accepted this, as she accepted many harsh truths, and went to hold her friends’ baby and cry into his soft black hair.

Over the next few weeks, she snuck Cassian peeks of the baby when Poe was calm, but if there was anyone who could not listen to screaming, even from such a cute baby, it was him.

He was polite in the way most people were to babies, she could tell his enthusiasm was feigned a bit for her benefit.

It made her sad, this obvious divide, even if she didn’t want a baby herself, she wanted him to enjoy Poe alongside her. It occurred to her again each time that she really was in a better place than Cassian was, and that burned instead of broke her.

 

Missions blurred together, they were too busy to think about anything but the rebellion. They lapsed into a comfortable partnership, reading well in combat, Jyn compensating for Cassian’s leg whenever she could. They ate meals together. They had the courage to speak frankly again. About purely professional matters, but he had her honesty all the same. And she had his, the fragile pieces of his fleeting, reactionary emotions; exhaustion, frustration, anger, all were no longer trapped in the pit in his stomach.

He would prop his elbow on the wall beside her as they witnessed a rookie mistake of one of their gunners, one their team shouldered impressively along anyway. But still, he slammed along next to her as he couldn’t watch anymore, exhaling a quiet _“Fuck.”_

His brow pressed to the cold metal. But he was speaking to her, obviously.

She nodded, squeezed his shoulder.

“Balaga, how about you take a deep breath before your next shot?” she bellowed to the gunner, not leaving room for argument.

The next shot hit its target. Cassian removed himself from her side, but the abruptness of it no longer offended her. The problem was solved.

Reluctantly, it occurred to her that Cassian Andor was becoming her friend.

She even accompanied him when Harter measured him for a replacement leg (not the fancy new limb he’d been promised, but an investment from his earnings for a more comfortable prosthetic). He didn’t want her to see, but she was there at the beginning and the end of the appointment, when he was all covered up, and waited dutifully in the hall as it was happening. He hadn’t asked her to be there, but he didn’t have to. Jyn insisted. She smiled when he stepped out of the office, Kalonia plugging the measurements into a datapad for the med droids to design around.

“Let’s burn the rusty old one,” she said with a wicked smile, her one eye shining enough for two.

Such was the weakness he gave to the rebellion, and given back was Jyn for his strength.

 

Jyn didn’t know how to breathe when she’d heard the victory shots on Endor. It was a miracle she learned how to again before the time it would take her to pass out. Her knees nearly collapsed, but someone overexcitable grabbed her arm and insisted “It’s over, it’s over, we won!” as she struggled forward on weak legs.

She would spend the rest of her life remembering that person, but could never put a face to them.

The words didn’t ring true. It never really felt over.

Jyn had expected euphoria, especially as a fresher soldier than many of those involved in the rebel alliance. This had only been her fight for the past few years, many of her friends had been child soldiers. Like Cassian.

There was no euphoria, not even an overwhelm of relief. It was just...over. An absence dropping her emotional state into a neutral, and a distrustful one at that. Jyn let out nervous laughs to the people celebrating around her, but she couldn’t stop walking around camp while everyone else was attacking each other with fierce embraces. She didn’t know where she was going. But she just kept walking, she would later find that she had for hours, in unmapped orbit of camp. She just...watched the emotions everyone else was feeling that she was so detached to.

The first one to celebrate with her, the first face of the rebellion she’d met all those years ago, was K2. She didn’t feel the need to smile for K2.

“We did it.”

The droid was impassive as always;

“Cassian needs you.”

Her stomach dropped. Maybe that’s what she had been waiting for.

 

K2 brought her to where he’d managed to hide Cassian, which was less comforting the more she thought about it. It was a back storage room. She marveled at how disorganized it was back there, until she realized the mess was Cassian throwing whatever he could at the wall, breaking everything he could get his hands on.

She turned to the droid.

“You have access to his medical records?”

“Yes.”

“He should have some anti-anxiety medication listed there, get us a strong dosage.”

She went behind Cassian immediately and braced his back, lowering him down with the gentlest disabling move she knew. He knew her touch, didn’t fight it, rested his back to her chest, hunched over in a ball between her legs. She stroked his shoulders, looking for the right words.

“It’s over,” he said finally, his voice a bunch of jagged edges from all the screaming.

She pressed her forehead to his spine.

“It’s beginning,” she tried, running her hand up and down his side. “There’s still so much work to be done. But we’re free, Cassian, _this is what you have been fighting for._ ”

He glanced over his shoulder at her, his eyes so sad her heart broke for a minute.

“What I’ve been fighting for has changed.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek.

“Do you really think I want you to drop dead because we won the war? I wanted you to see this day. I wanted you to enjoy it.”

“Jyn, how can I move on? I don’t know anything else but the rebellion. Everyone was just trying to get me to this point, and there was no plan after that. I can’t let anyone _touch me_ without wanting to scream, so-”

“You don’t like being touched?” Jyn slid backwards, “I wish you’d told me.”

_“Don’t stop.”_

It was the only time he’d yelled at her like that. He got intense, he had cruel tones, he said hurtful things; but he did not yell.

Jyn withdrew, despite his order. She had to remember that in this state, her emotions were only so important. Instead, her hand lowered to the center of his back.

“It’ll get easier.”

Her hand rose and fell with his breath.

“How do you know?”

It’s all she could hope for.

“It has to. What choice is there.” She crawled closer. “Cassian, does me touching you bother you? If it upsets you…”

He propped his arms on his knees. He couldn’t look at her. He stared straight ahead. Cleared his throat;

“It’s different when it’s you.”

She closed herself off from this topic. “It can’t just be me. I can’t heal that, it’ll be too easy for me to become the only one you let close to you. That’s not a life, Cassian.”

K2 returned with an injection extending from a circuit, Cassian sat still, though she wasn’t sure how much he needed it. His eyes flickered to her as the needle went in.

She tried to remember that the war was over.

But she knew in her heart for Cassian, it was not.

 

K2 became the one to wordlessly summon Jyn in the week following their victory. He would walk up to her and stop at her feet. She would put a hand on his arm, nod, and allowed him to lead her to wherever Cassian was.

Jyn was in line to receive a medal with the rest of Rogue One during a later celebration, after the main players in the rebellion had gotten their moment. Leia waved off her medal, as she had done after the destruction of the Death Star, in honor of the losses on Alderaan. She expressed she didn’t want the reward for serving her people, she felt she merely did what she had to. Han followed in suit, which Jyn found charming, as did Leia, who hadn’t left his side or stopped smiling at him the whole week. They had not coordinated this with Luke, who looked uncomfortable up there with Chewbacca and two droids.

Jyn was wearing a sparkly white dress, borrowed from someone unfamiliar and designed for a waify thing without muscle or scar, so all she could think about was her battered skin under the backless cut. She hadn’t even gotten nicer shoes so she was stuck with her boots under the trailing fabric. There wasn’t anything she could do with her hair. She contemplating just cutting it off, but then it’d be harder to tie back. Maybe that would be her first postwar luxury. Her first thought was she missed how she hadn’t had to worry about appearances for so long.

She was almost relieved when K2 came to find her.

“It’s-”

She held up her hands, he didn’t need to say more. “I’ve got it.”

She lifted the hem of the glittering dress, followed the droid where he led her. Another storage room. It was painfully common for these outbreaks. They were reinforced so sound didn’t carry that far.

Cassian had tired himself out, it seemed, because he was hunched over on the floor. Jyn knelt by his side, picked up one of his hands and squeezed it.

“Are you alright?”

He pushed her hand back towards her like he was trying to give it back to her. “Yes, Jyn, I’ll be fine. It’s okay. You go celebrate.”

“Well then you’ll be alone here. That doesn’t sound very fair.”

“You don’t need to take care of me, Jyn.”

“Well,” she squeezed his hand again, lifting her skirt to be able to sit comfortably on the filthy floor, “I’m not taking care of you. Sometimes we just need a little help to guide us home.”

He squeezed her hand back, but she saw his shoulders tense.

“Come here,” she said, remembering her mother scooping her up as a child, the way she now did for Poe when he threw a tantrum, “up, off the ground.”

She lifted his head to rest on her shoulder, arms around him.

“Cassian, can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“Did you kill Moll?”

His hand fell defensively on her leg, right above her knee.

“I may...be part of the reason she didn’t come back.”

Jyn thought about it for only a minute. She didn’t need to hear more.

“Okay.”

He glanced up at her.

“You’re not...upset to hear that?”

“I would strangle her myself if I could.”

He tried to lift himself up off of her shoulder to look at her, but her hands held fast to the back of his head, keeping him down. “Jyn…”

“Shhh, it’s okay.” She kept stroking him. “When I found out what she did to you, I was so angry, I was wishing I could bash her skull in.”

Jyn eased him down to rest his head in her lap. She stroked his hair like her mother used to do for her.

“You were...angry for me? Why?”

She tugged him closer, and he felt her rage furred against her skin, enveloping him. It made him feel safe for a moment.

“Because you matter to me.”

He sighed, burying his face in her skirt, hiding in his thoughts. She stroked his hair; letting him. "I was so fucking angry, I wanted to murder her."

He mumbled something she couldn't hear, and shushed him, scratching his scalp in soft rotations until he relaxed against her. 

Some time later, he lifted his head from her lap. It was late. It may have been hours. Jyn lost track of time too.

“I’m making you miss the party.”

She shook her head. “I’m fine here with you.”

“You should be celebrating.”

She combed her fingers into his hair. she felt so tired, but finally relaxed, the first time since she'd heard the victory shots.

“I am.”

 

Kes and Shara were the first to leave, to start their new life with Poe. Jyn couldn’t blame them, but her sobs when she said goodbye to Poe were some of the most agonized of her life.

“Auntie Jyn can visit whenever she wants,” Kes soothed Poe when he cried over being taken from her arms, or at least that’s what everyone in the room blamed it on, not the proximity of such a hysterical woman.

She covered Poe’s face in kisses, squeezing his little hands as he babbled nonsense.

And when their ship was out of sight, retreated to her room to have her own meltdown. K2 didn’t fetch anyone, though she would have taken some of the drugs he usually got for Cassian.

Cassian came to her door that night, his eyes flashing with concern as it slid open.

“I heard that Dameron left with his family,” he adjusted his weight onto his good leg, “Are you alright?”

Jyn’s face was puffy from tears. “Goodbyes” were usually forever, in her experience.

“I’ll be alright,” she waved a dismissive hand, “I’m just...you know?”

Cassian smiled “If you need a distraction…”

He shook his head, like he talked himself out of the idea.

She raised her eyebrows, laughing in spite of herself, “I’m listening.”

He glanced up at her cautiously. “If you wanted to get a drink…”

She crossed her arms over her chest, shrugging. “I could stand one.”

The bars were rowdy, so when he stole into his room for a bottle of Festian strong liquor she didn’t object for the inoffensive empty training room he choose to share it with her in.

They leaned up against one of the padded walls, stretched out comfortably.

“Where do you go from here?” he asked her, and there was a wistfulness in his eye.

She shrugged. “Lah’mu,” she admitted, her voice breaking a little.

“Really?”

“It’s what I miss. The only thing I miss that I can have back, you know?”

He nodded. “I’d like to go to my home planet, but…”

She raised her eyebrows. He stared at his hands, glancing at her guiltily.

“I sort of have something lined up. Leia offered me a job on the council for the plans for the Rebel Alliance government. I leave for Bespin soon.”

“Cassian, that’s fantastic.”

He smiled shyly to himself, unable to look at the genuine happiness on her face.

“It’s not what I pictured.”

“Will it be too much?”

He shrugged. “That past few months...I’m taking things slowly. Keeping busy. It’ll be a lot of work, not a lot of…”

She nodded, taking another heavy swig of liquor. “That sounds right for you right now.”

He still wouldn’t look at her, which annoyed her. She grabbed his hand.

“Cassian, I am happy for you.”

Finally, he caught her cheek in his hand, so gently it almost hurt more than a slap. Seeming to regain control of himself, he diverted his face to kiss her brow instead of her lips, which he was suspiciously close to. She squeezed his hand, letting the retraction lie as it was.

“I will never forgive Moll,” he told her with finality. “Even though we won. Even though her dedication to our cover got us access to more information than I could have hoped for. To the point I was almost disgusted we won. I didn’t want her efforts to be validated for a greater good.”

“I don’t want your suffering to be validated for a greater good,” Jyn replied, leaning her head on his shoulder.

He nodded.

Her head lulled gently against his shoulder. She might have been shrugging.

He surprised her and laughed softly.

“I remember on Jedha, when I reluctantly let you keep that blaster. It was so you would be able to defend yourself, hopefully I wouldn’t need to keep you and myself out of danger at the same time. But then you… utterly destroyed those stormtroopers, and I had to get over my shock that your temper actually justified a deft hand. You never stop surprising me, Jyn Erso.”

Tears blurred her vision. His head leaned back, but she couldn’t feel pain radiating from him. Just a sense of contentment.

“I’m sorry, Cassian.”

“I’ll miss you, Jyn.”

It finally hit her that they would be parting ways.

 

They didn’t want to say goodbye. Jyn ached at the thought of it. The guilt over parting was a heated blade pressed to her heart, but they had to eventually.

His time was coming, when Leia’s council was convening for plans of a restructured government. Jyn was so proud of the honor bestowed on Cassian to be invited, and grateful it was a safe place for him to go, under Leia’s wing, where he would be somewhere familiar enough. Cloud City would have a lot of people, maybe that would make the separation easier. She hoped.

She snuck up behind him at the mess hall, knowing he would leave the next morning. They were out of time to be thickheaded. She pinned his arm behind his back, just because.

“Meet me in the training gym to talk about our feelings,” she ordered, her chin on his shoulder. He turned his face to hers, blurred from proximity, exactly how he liked it best with Jyn.

His hand covered the one she braced on his side.

“Alright.”

 

He beat her there, standing there like such a good soldier her heart broke a little. But when he saw her, he relaxed his stance.

There are moments that are hinged on connecting the space between two people; so Jyn did just that and ran. Her body collided with his, he let out a groan of air and surprise, but caught her in his arms regardless. Like he’d ever miss the chance for this.

“Thank you for being there for me this week,” he murmured into her hair, “and every other time.”

She shook her head, wedging her face further into his shoulder. He was so damn warm all the time. “It’s what you do, Cassian.”

Unlike her, he didn’t question that logic any further.

“You’re the love of my life, Jyn,” he whispered into her hair. But he wasn’t asking her to stay. He was letting her go.

“You haven’t lived that long,” she smiled up at him, breaking their hold.

He shook his head. “I know.”

Jyn stepped back. Her hands started to shake. But there was something she wanted to see.

She lifted the patch over her dead eye. It was still white, with a mottled lid. She hadn’t let anyone see it since the patch became a constant part of her face. She let her hand drop with it clenched there, face bare.

Cassian didn’t flinch at the sight of it. He stepped forward, cupping her face. His eyes shone. Home.

Gentle fingers brushed the loose hair that covered part of her face, exposing her. Her breath fluttered nervously.

He kissed the scarred cheek beneath it, hovered his lips over the lid until it fluttered shut, and kissed beneath the brow.

“You’re beautiful,” he promised her.

Jyn was there when he boarded his ship to Bespin with K2 the next morning. She hung back in the distance, but he _knew_ she was there _-as though she could hide it-_ and he jogged off to her spot at the giant front gates of the hangar to hug her goodbye. She felt better that he would have his best friend with him.

She felt less so that she could not say the same.

She would only see Cassian again once in the next ten years.

At the end of those ten years; there would be another war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, okay, I gave it almost 24 hours. I’ve read a lot of comments. I’ve meditated on it.  
> Despite a lot of shouting, I do not regret the ending of chapter seven.  
> This was always the plan for the story you guys. But since people are upset with this choice, I figured I would explain myself as clearly as possible on this platform;  
> Cassian and Jyn have been through a lot. A lot. And the end goal of this story has always been health before romance. You have tens of thousands of words of my other stories to get romance and smut. But this one resonated for a specific reason, and I believe in my core that this is the reason that it did.  
> And because Cassian and Jyn have been through a lot, they are owed a break. They are owed time to build their own lives and heal and find themselves, because they were so young when this all started. I’m using film canon that Jyn is 23 and Cassian is 26, making them not yet thirty by the time chapter seven rolls around.  
> Your life is not over if you aren’t with the person you are meant to be with when you’re not even thirty, and it isn’t over if you’re not with the person you are meant to be with before you’re forty. War demands sacrifice, and in this instance the sacrifice is that they need to rebuild their lives. I don’t like codependency, it’s the opposite of what I like best in myself. That’s the lesson I’m always trying to impart, your strength is always your own. Cassian and Jyn support each other, but their will to survive is their own. Cassian couldn’t make Jyn’s life better by solving her problems, Jyn could intervene when Cassian was in danger but she couldn’t force him to practice self care. They had to choose the hard thing and live.  
> I truly do not see this situation as tragic. At the state they are in, I think this is what’s best for them. Cassian and Jyn’s behavior throughout this whole story hasn’t made them bad people, but it has made it clear that they should respect, support, and care about each other in a guarded way. At least for now.  
> They have made great strides to heal, but the last thing that they have not given each other is time. Non-exposure. And distance. The only gift I never see given to Cassian and Jyn is time, something these characters both deserved. Never, ever let time alone to discover yourself translate into tragedy. I was so happy to give them the space they deserved.  
> Things may seem easier because we are feeling loved, but I didn’t write this to do things the easy way.  
> Rape is hard. Survival is hard. Trying to connect yourself from the person you were when you were healthy to the person you are now because you’re sick is one of the hardest fucking things out there. I’m doing this the way that feels right to me, for people that I love, and for myself.  
> I hope this helps you understand.  
> On a lighter note, Chapter 8 will be up by the end of July, most likely next week, and we will be exploring the relationship if given that essential time to grow into themselves. Trust me guys. I’ve hinted at this before. It has a happy ending.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, hi, I'm aware everyone's mad at me. Refer to my notes at the end of the last chapter for the Ten Years Controversy, but before you read this chapter, some housekeeping:
> 
> 1\. I fucked up my timelines for TFA, so they do have to wait the full ten years before seeing each other. Sorry. There is so much fluff at the end of this fic, calm down. 
> 
> 2\. This chapter was either going to take another three weeks and be the length of 2 1/2 chapters, or I could split it and divide and conquer. So, if you don't follow me on tumblr, this is to tell you that there is one more chapter coming after this.

Poe visited in the summer. Every summer. It was always proposed as a week-long visit, but he’d whine over the commlink home to his parents about all the more fun things he didn’t get to do yet,  _ please, just one more week with Auntie Jyn please, _ and one week later he would be swinging his legs over the back of the cart Jyn drove into town every day on a rickety old droid that broke down without fail every trip. 

The grass tossed like the ocean around her legs, a constant, but Poe grew out of the grass, the marker of his age in when his head finally crowned the top of it, then his neck extended out of the swarm, soon his chest. 

Jyn had her small life with a village a few hours walk from her home. She didn’t try to find the coordinates she had lived at with her parents, she believed in her heart it would hurt too much. But she found a small cottage in a remote, grassy hill, and the smells and the sounds were all the same from childhood. There were mornings she woke and almost believed she was a child again, lying between her parents during the many times she snuck into their bed during the night. The best case scenario, Poe would be there, toddle into her room and tackle her before the ache started to sharpen. 

But most mornings it was just an absence in her bed, and she meditated on missing.

Time, now that she had it, went quickly.

Chirrut and Baze kept in contact, but the subject of visiting was never breached. She didn’t know why. They talked about meditations and gardening and aching joints and Jyn’s travels to see old rebellion friends, but maybe they would have to face the family they had made and without Cassian and Bodhi it would be too sad. 

Maybe it was because the war was over. 

Jyn could have afforded a nicer place to live, instead of the small house drowning in grass. She could have moved somewhere closer to her friends. She could have picked a place where it wouldn’t be so remote. 

Jyn had been alone for most of her life, but she had been treated to very little privacy. Barracks and prison cells and the alliance gossip. This was her greatest luxury. Jyn was able to stop hiding her feelings from her own face, because there was no one to see. She practiced that openness with the very nonjudgmental Poe. He loved his dirt-covered, unglamorous Auntie.

“That flower is good against burns,” she informed him, pointing to what was clutched in his chubby fist. 

He stared down at it. 

“Who told you that?”

She chewed her lower lip. “My mother.”

Poe had just crossed the age that she had seen her mother for the last time. Jyn thought about that every day of his visit that summer. 

He handed her the smushed plant. 

“For your eye,” he told her bluntly. She smiled a shaky smile, the one that twisted her face in a last ditch-effort to avoid tears. It didn’t work. 

She pressed the flower to her cheek. It smelled like the moment her mother had told her that it helped burns, when she was a child, and her mother was still alive. Maybe it did, maybe remembering her helped, but there was a coolness at her cheek with it pressed to her skin.

Before she was done crying through their walk, Poe blurted out that he wanted pears for lunch. Jyn burst out laughing, it wasn’t cruelty that made him redirect the focus of her feelings, merely an acceptance of them moment by moment. 

After he left in the fall, she meditated on her parents, a subject she had been too afraid to touch during the rebellion. 

Jyn loved visitors, but she adored being alone. 

 

Bodhi had vanished from base by the time she left for Lah’mu. She’d tried to ask around for him, but if she didn’t know, no one did. Leia, when she managed to detach from Han, similarly paced around, looking for her brother, which Jyn was infinitely confused by until someone told her that Leia had recently found out Luke was her twin. But he was already gone too.

Finding out Vader was her father had been a hard thing for Leia to face, and while her brother was rebuilding the Jedi Order, she faced it alone. 

Jyn sat with her for a few rounds of morning caff before she left for Clou City, quietly musing on the idea of the father you knew against the father who made you the person you were; for better or for worse. 

“You just find it isn’t the thing that makes you ruined, it just makes you what you are, whatever that is,” Jyn said simply, shrugging around her mug. Leia nodded, her jaw gritted.

“He killed so many people.”

Jyn nodded. “You’re not your father.”

Leia pressed her hands to her face. “But he’s a part of me I never knew.”

“You had Bail Organa. And Breha. You had a mother, too. Don’t let him overpower all the good in you she left behind.”

“Padme,” Leia mused softly. The memory seemed to make her sad.

“Lyra,” Jyn offered, her guard raising as soon as the word slipped free. 

Leia flinched, because the wife of Galen Erso was not a welcome thought before. Just like his daughter was once begrudged. 

But Leia remembered her father and took pity at first, then empathy. She smiled at Jyn. 

“It’s still going to be a struggle, picking through the worst of them.” 

Jyn, nodded, stirring a spoon through the caff to keep her hands busy. She could not call herself read to try to salvage all the good in Galen Erso, as much as she loved him and his complicated legacy. 

“You’re going to Bespin soon?” 

Leia nodded. “Lando is there to keep Han occupied. We’re...taking things slow.”

Jyn nodded as though she understood. Since Cassian left, she’d had half a mind to jump him in a closet if she saw him again. Until all logic on those matters set in…

Jyn’s exit was quiet. She picked up her bag and the ship that offered to shuttle her to Lah’mu was waiting, no one to see her off or help her board. As she passed a bench of purposeless soldiers waiting for their own transport, she heard a voice cry out “You’re  _ leaving?” _

It came from a student, a stricken-looking Twi’lek who had caused a world of trouble during class. 

Obviously she was, but it was the kind of hopeless, this-is-really-over statement that cracked her heart in two. 

Jyn stopped said goodbye to three of her students, who had no personal reason to be informed of her exit, despite their indignation. They hugged her anyway, wishing her well. 

The third to say goodbye was Lisbon.

“I don’t think there is any comparison of who you were before to who you are now,” he said, his cheeks limp with that boyish, caught look. Jyn patted his shoulder as she released their hug. 

“Remember your strengths,” she instructed them all, “forgive your weaknesses.”

Then she picked up her bag and left. 

 

Occasionally on Lah’mu, she would tap into a comm link to Bodhi, and he would answer with vague statements and wave off her questioning. 

_ “I’m good. I’m happy. I’m  _ **_busy,_ ** ” he’d say with a chuckle. 

“Please tell me where you are,” she’d hedge.

He’d ignore the question.  _ “You worry too much. Tell me more about your garden.” _

Whatever it was, wherever he was, he was not ready to tell her. Jyn could only lean back on the one thing that was now reliable to her; patience.

 

Cassian, instead of Bodhi, reported back to her after a few months of silence. 

_ “I’m sorry I waited so long, I didn’t know how much of an update you would want, or if I’d be intruding.” _

Jyn closed the cabinet in front of her as she held the comm link close to her mouth, and tried to remember the last time she’d talked to someone. It had been a few days. The absence didn’t feel isolating, but calming. 

“Whatever you want to tell me,” she assured him

He had stopped taking his meds, because he didn’t seem to need them anymore. 

_ “They stabilized the extremes,” he said, excusing himself, like he owed her something, “But there just aren’t...I’m more balanced now. So I just felt like I was wearing counterweights to walk across the floor, you know?” _

“I’m glad,” she sat on her ‘fresher counter, staring at her ankle, too scared to move or raise her voice above a whisper since he had called, paranoid it wasn’t real. 

“How’s your leg?”

_ “Hideous, as usual,”  _ he joked humorlessly. She clucked at him, chastising.

“Someday someone is going to worship at that scar in gratitude that you’d survived it all, in order for them to find you.”

She heard him groan.  _ “There’s this magical  _ **_‘someone’_ ** _ now, is there?” _

The link went silent, because she didn’t know what next to say. 

“I want there to be,” she finally admitted.

There was an awkward silence, this hesitant sort of withdrawal. 

_ “Jyn, how are you?”  _ Cassian finally asked.

She looked at her sun-darkened feet, wondering to herself for the honest answer.

Poe had left from his first visit two weeks ago. He had crawled around every surface of her house, almost fell down several steep inclines, and yanked innumerable fistfuls of her hair out in his tiny hands. It was an unparalleled joy.

He said his goodbyes, both of them tanner and wilder than they had been before reunited, and Kes looking slightly concerned to see how scraped up his child was upon return. Shara shrugged it off, accepting her three-year-old with a quiet grace. 

“He has all his limbs,” she appeased Kes, who was closely examining a scrape on the heel of Poe’s hand. Jyn kissed the mark, shrugging at Kes. 

“It was almost worse,” she said, her only offered explanation. 

Jyn had her tea in the morning, and quietly checking her barely-self sustaining garden, a collection of data files about botany and engineering she’d lifted from the rebellion library. There were two burly veterans in town who thought she was the funniest person to walk on land that she saw about once a week, when she sold what vegetables she didn’t want or had a surplus of. She had foggy mornings and deep green grass. 

She had what she’d never had before. Routine. Predictability. Reliability. 

Time. 

“I’m good,” she admitted, a shyness fluttering through her. Maybe she was. Maybe it was finally, just that easy.

She heard Cassian release a breath. 

_ “I”m glad to hear that.” _

“Are you?”

_ “I’m getting there.” _

They mentioned who they saw, who they visited. Chirrut’s calls to Cassian were completely dietary advice to cleanse his body, post-medication. Han and Leia eloped, there were no upcoming nuptials to excuse a reunion. Cassian also heard little from Bodhi and could give no information. 

They did not extend any invitations to each other. She knew what would happen if they stepped into each other’s lives at that point. They weren’t ready.

Jyn wasn’t afraid. She had made less likely things possible through hope. 

 

Time was a luxury, Jyn let herself be spoiled. Poe’s daring, can-do attitude blossomed summer after summer, Jyn spotting him as a barely-needed chaperone as he explored caverns and beaches and strange things immersed in the swaying grass. 

Her feet were sore and her skin tight from sunburn at the end of his visits, and she loved every second. Shara and Kes would sometimes, separately because they were so busy, stay a day or two alongside Poe when they picked him up or dropped him off, but they didn’t understand his love for Jyn’s home and Jyn had little to entertain them with. She was fine with that, it was her job as Poe’s Auntie to give him a place to go.

Cassian called every few months. The conversations were so terrifyingly raw, spoken in whispers, not in content but in the re-opening of wounds to expose depths that went better off hidden in their real lives. They had real lives, then they had the connection between them, which was deeply private. They couldn’t manage more frequently for that very reason.

_ “This elusive ‘someone’?” _ he asked once. 

“Do you have one?”

_ “Do you?” _

“No.”

_ “Oh,” _ he cleared his throat,  _ “That’s why I brought it up.” _

Her brow furrowed, hands stilling from whatever they were doing.

“Do you have someone?”

_ “It would be easier to do that if you did too.” _

“Don’t worry about me,” she held out the comm to Poe, who was eating dinner, the fattiest cuts of meat his mother would never allow in his diet at home, “Say ‘hi’ to Poe.”

_ “Hello Poe.” _

“I caught a frog today. Jyn cooked it.”

_ “That’s wonderful.” _

Jyn tucked her hand in Poe’s curls, kissed the crown of his head. 

Cassian told her  _ “I meant what I said” _ before they said goodbye for her to tuck Poe into bed. 

She knew what he was talking about, wished time had changed that. There were lovers she had, stealing off when she got lonely during the winter months and finding a veteran in a bar who wanted to sing songs to her or idly play with her hair as she slept beside him; but it was nothing that dipped into the core of her like he had. She didn’t try to change that, Cassian was welded into her structure, the shape of her changed to accommodate him. 

She sat in her dark kitchen as Poe slept, and suddenly it hit her like a brick what she had just so flippantly given up. 

Jyn found herself visiting with Han and Leia, though Han was just about out the door when she arrived. He was charming and personable when she greeted him, but there was an awkwardness when it was clear he wasn’t staying long, and Leia was obviously not happy about it. He fidgeted on his feet until Jyn let the conversation drop and he could be out the door. 

The house was sleek, spacious, and very clean. The unlivable kind of spotless. Not that Leia cleaned, there were droids for that, but it caused a sort of sting to eye to look at. She could not picture Han on the couches, drink in his hand. Not that she could picture Leia stretched out comfortably any more easily. She talked with Leia every once in awhile, when there was a need for the same connection over parentage. But it was rare because Leia was so  _ busy.  _

“I’m sorry I missed Han,” Jyn tried to make amends, her politeness rough around the edges. She was raised in communal housing; she was a terrible houseguest.

Leia waved her off with a feigned easy-going attitude; “Don’t think twice about it, I’m sure he’s not.”

Jyn found herself overcompensating by entertaining Ben, who Leia was resistant to send to Luke just yet.

“The Jedi recruit young,” Jyn observed mildly, not trying to add to the conflict.

Wires were crossing in Leia’s life, though the light in her eyes would never die, her mouth was downturned in a way it didn’t used to be. 

“I want to go,” Ben said. She thought Poe had prepared her for quality time with her friend’s children. Ben was proof she was wrong in this belief. He was a driven, polite kid, but there was a coldness to his eyes that always left Jyn on edge. He had a princely posture to him, though he was not living like royalty, like his mother had. Jyn had a sense he enjoyed her discomfort, the favor it gave him in control. Han had been like that, but only in a mocking way that flustered every woman he ever spoke to. He respected Jyn as a person during missions when he called her “Short Stuff” even as she was responsible for defusing a detonator. Ben held her eye a little too long, a little too directly, the gaze twitching back and forth on a tense pendulum of momentum that made it clear;  _ good eye, bad eye, good eye, bad eye. _

The whole idea of breaking down his tactics shamed her. He was a child. 

Leia lifted her head from whatever she was doing in the kitchen.

“Yes, as does Uncle Luke, but you are a child and he is not your mother, so I outvote you both.”

“Dad says-”

“I outvote dad,” Leia pinched her brow between her fingers. “Go play.”

Ben walked soundlessly out of the room. Jyn was uneasy, Leia had created such a perfected image of strength and compassion, to see her family as flawed, as human, was jarring and unsettling.

“I bet he’s reading Jedi scrolls in his room,” Leia murmured bitterly.

“Where would he have gotten those?”

“Luke. I swear he’s trying to turn him against me.”

“I’m sure he just sees Ben’s potential. Force-sensitive children are hard to find because parents are so afraid to what happened to the last generation of Jedi.” 

“He’s just bored now that there’s no war going on. I’m sure in a few years time he’ll be thrilled with some good news on that front.”

Jyn’s stomach dropped. Sure, she had never believed the soldier on Endor who told her it was over, but she didn’t think this was building back up again already. Leia would know if there was reason to fear, and she looked regretful, like she said something she hadn’t meant to.

“Didn’t we just finish a war?” she hedged weakly, her voice pitching higher than she intended. 

Leia glanced up from something on her datapad. Her mouth had a defeated draw to it that Jyn didn’t recognize. “People of our generation remember war; they know it. They think because we’ve built something flawed, that they should go back to what they know and overturn everything again, instead of fixing the flawed thing we created.”

Jyn stared into her cup, dread overtaking her. 

“It’s what they know, and it kept away demons for a long time.”

She remembered Cassian’s demons, his body breaking the week of victory. 

She liked her life. But there was a hollowness inside her. 

Maybe she didn’t know she was hungry for war until it was dangled in her face, like meat in front of a starved dog. It was her nature to sharpen her teeth. 

 

There was a quiet anniversary gathering of the Tenth Anniversary of The Battle of Endor. Jyn had initially suggested the idea to Leia, who needed some cheering up after Ben left to train under Luke. Despite trying to pass it off as Leia’s project, she ended up doing most of the work. Leia hosted, but Jyn had the much harder job of wrangling people. 

Bodhi swiftly declined. He said he was far too busy.  

Kes agreed to be there, but Shara was on another mission, and Jyn half-suspected he just wanted to bring Poe along for some free childcare, with Jyn being there. 

Most of the people she ended up getting were closer to Leia’s circle, now successful from the war, and not the patchy rebel sergeants Jyn had grown to love. She’d cursed nearly unforgivably at Baze and Chirrut for declining to attend and bail her out of awkward conversation. 

It was an awkward assembly of soldiers, an informal dinner, in Leia’s droid-spotless house. Jyn got there a day early to help Leia prepare. Stiffly, Leia informed her that Han couldn’t make it back in time. Jyn already felt the forced boisterousness that many of the guests were going to take on once they discovered this. 

They drank wine together the night before and made fun of Han with a toothless malevolence. Leia clearly needed it, and Jyn was good at adapting to those needs. She felt cheap taking shots at him when he wasn’t there to defend himself, especially aggravating a wedge in his relationship, so she aimed for ones that would probably make him laugh if her were there anyway. 

Leia did not. But Jyn couldn’t say she wasn’t equally accurate. 

“Luke’s overworking Ben.”

“You’re his mother. I’m sure training is hard-”

_ “Ben hates him,”  _ Leia stared at the ceiling, “but becoming a Jedi, the light side of the force, isn’t this how we keep him from becoming my father?”

Jyn didn’t have answers. She lived in the same isolated planet her father had, read the same science texts, and never used her hands to kill again. 

She remembered that was why her father moved to the isolated planet, before he was removed. 

“What does Han-”

“Han says nothing. He makes his excuses and leaves me to deal with it. I’m not charming about it all anymore. It gets tiring being the only adult here.”

“Then I guess Ben has to make his own choices. Did he ask to leave?”

The worried mother and general shook her head. “No. If anything he wants to stay more because of it.”

Jyn’s stomach twisted. Leia had little else to say. 

Preparations for the dinner party were breathless. 

Jyn had asked Cassian to be there. 

He had laughed.  _ “Is there a possibility I would ever miss this?” _

It wasn’t the dramatic reunion she had thought it would be, after so many years. Alone in the kitchen, opening an old, expensive bottle of Alderaan wine as Leia was still getting ready. He was early. Maybe hoping for this to happen, just like she had been.

A protocol droid allowed him into the house, and the door slid to find Jyn with a bottle clenched between her thighs, face twisted in the struggle to get the cork out. She almost dropped the bottle on the floor when she saw it was him, and that would have been a brutal end to one of the last bottles of an export of Alderaan in existence. 

He smiled, pulled the bottle free from the grip of her thighs, uncorking it easily, and set it on the counter. Her breath let out when the bottle was pulled out from between her knees. His thumbs found her cheeks, gently stroking them as his hands cradled her face. 

“I almost broke it,” she blurted out, her face turning very red. Wasn’t she supposed to be more mature, more put together after all these years? 

His fingers dipped to the cradle of her skull at the base of her neck. Her eye clenched shut as he shushed her. 

_ “It’s alright.” _

She opened her eye.

“Hey,” she said weakly, trying very hard not to cry. 

He’d gained the weight back, that he had starved off of himself after Moll’s assaults. He didn’t have this fragile posture he used to. There was a coldness to his brow, a dark furrow, and she imagined a woman across a boardroom trying to get close to him. Hopefully failing. 

He was still stiff, still guarded in the eyes, but he looked  _ better. _ He looked weary, but excited, like the person she had gone into battle with the very first time. 

“Hey,” he said back; stronger, smiling. 

The skin that vanished under the eyepatch was smooth. Her brow wasn’t angrily furrowed. 

She didn’t look at him and immediately walk away.

She rose on her toes to kiss his cheek, because they were friends, because they loved each other, because she was tired of pretending anything else, and he kissed her cheek back.

Next came the crushing, reassuring hug, her body pressed to the length of his; one Leia interrupted. 

“Andor,” she looked lovely upon her entrance, her hair in a braided crown, but not wearing white. Jyn hadn’t seen her in white in years. “You’re going to have to be my date tonight because my nerf-for-brains husband can’t make it.”

Graciously, Cassian kissed Leia’s cheek too, but Jyn noted for the first of several times that evening that his proximity to others still wasn’t easy for him. 

“Of course,” he reassured her, “by the time everyone leaves, there will be rumors we’re having an affair.”

“”Rumors? I want  _ evidence _ ,” Leia teased easily, seeming to have relaxed into her role of hostess. Cassian Andor was an exemplary man, something Jyn snooped about on her datapad during the occasion when she had a drink or two.

Jyn laughed. Giddiness rode up her spine, because Cassian was looking at her and he was smiling at her and she could not have imagined that happening in a long time.

The house filled slowly, then abruptly, like parties do. Dinner was lavish, Leia having thrown a great deal of resources into it to feel productive. She’d sometimes call Jyn during odd hours, for both their planet’s time, thinking out loud about side dishes she could order. Jyn was a relatively impassive listener. 

Though Cassian was Leia’s escort; Poe was the one who earned her heart by the end of the party. 

Poe was really too big to fit in Jyn’s lap anymore, but she held him there anyway, and he rested his head back on her shoulder and fidgeted and called across the table to Leia, testing the limits of his newest discovery:  _ an attitude, _ to which Leia doted on him with the dryest of replies.

_ “Deviant,” _ she condemned, stone-faced like a judge, “Just like his father.”

Kes laughed heartily, shaking his head, and Jyn tickled Poe’s sides as his face went pale. He broke out into giggles at the subtle, benevolent smirk Leia shot him. 

“Are you jealous yet, Jyn?” Kes teased at Leia and Poe’s new partnership.

She laughed, shaking her head. “I’m just the Auntie. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been that made perfect sense to me.”

Cassian slung his arm over the back of her chair and tried to make her laugh constantly, and succeeded every time, because she saw he was trying and wanted him to succeed. She’d clutch his shoulder sometimes, turning fully towards him to laugh with him, which he realized in that moment was rare. People contained their humor; there was something like love for the person you locked eyes with from across the room when something funny happened. Even if she only had one eye. 

A general and his wife got in a terse argument, leaving to bicker in the ‘fresher’ by the time the fourth bottle had gone around the table, and again his theory was proven when Jyn turned to him with a distorted  _ I-didn’t-say-anything _ expression on her face. Like they sought each other out to check their own reactions. It was such a togetherness.

Once, his hand lifted and thumb stroked the peach fuzz on the nape of her neck. She shivered, glanced at him. He didn’t look away. 

 

When dinner was over, and she was seeing off the attending Damerons, insisting on carrying sleeping Poe draped over her upper body, Cassian walked with her. As their shuttle flew off, he guided her with a hand on her lower back. 

“Where are we going, Captain?” she teased, happy and a little more than drunk. He chuckled, shook his head. 

“One more drink. I need to toast to my fellow soldier.”

She let him guide her to an elevator and into the streets below.

“Okay.”

“And I’ve been trying to get you alone all evening.”

She didn’t try to hide her sly smile. 

“Okay.”

 

He found someplace quiet, a miracle in Cloud City, immersed in the night sky on a rooftop bar. 

“Quite a place,” she observed, sipping her drink. She felt self-conscious about the eyepatch; it used to be the post-war fashion, but most veterans pooled their savings to fix such glaring disfigurements, it seemed. 

“You get connections, knowing Leia.”

She smirked at him, “How mysterious of you. Are you still a spy?”

He shook his head as he leaned back in his chair, laughing. The clouds had a faint glow in the distance of nearby buildings, but they were isolated in that glow. 

“I can’t tell you.”

“Well now you have to.”

She was being flippant, overly flirty, awkward. She didn’t know how else to be around him again, everything was so intense, and she had waned to peace. 

His eyes softened. “How are you, Jyn?”

“I missed you,” she admitted, grabbing his hand. Now she understood the distance, the refusal to include him in her life, or to enter his. It was harder to let go after this. “I’m good, I’m good. Happy. Learning to be, at least.”

He nodded. “I’m glad.”

“How are you, Cassian?”

She smiled, tearing up, because she could say his name and he could hear it;  _ in person.  _

“The first few years were rough,” his immediate openness astounded her. He took a deep breath. “I lived in my work for the Alliance. Missed you like crazy. Kept on my meds for that exact reason. But I learnt to live around it, you know? And once I accommodated that absence, it was livable, and...I like my work. I like taking pride in my work, open pride, without having to shoot someone in the back to be successful.”

Her previous spy comments  _ humiliated _ her now. She blurted out her next thought, defensive; “Is there this elusive ‘someone’ now?”

He took a sip of his drink, staring off into the distance. 

“Yes.”

Jyn’s face twisted in a smile, but her voice cracked with her congratulations. “I’m glad.”

She grabbed his hand, her breath escaping her again. “Cassian, I’m glad.” He voice was stronger this time. If anything it ended the problem that was bubbling up in their solitude;  _ what do we do next? _

The answer was simple;  _ proceed as if nothing changed.  _

He shrugged, his eyes were sad. “I feel guilty. She’s not you.”

Jyn shook her head. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” he stared at his drink. “You’re the strongest person I know. You’ll survive never being stuck with me. I feel bad for  _ her.” _

Jyn let it lie, let it shrivel, let it go. 

“How’s…  _ touch _ been?”

His shoulders shifted, defensive. 

“It’s...harder to get back into it than I thought. She’s patient. She’s actually a psychologist…” he smiled at her incredulously look, “not  _ my _ psychologist, but you know… sympathetic. Adept.”

She nodded, suddenly knowing he was with the person who could give him what she never could. 

Still, a tear slipped down her cheek, and she was quiet. 

Cassian grew anxious, the familiarity of his panic made her ache at how he’d kept it under control all evening. 

“Jyn, you know that if you asked for me, all of me,  _ you’d have it.” _

_ “That’s not fair of me to do to you or to anyone else.” _

All of their relationship was built around knowing when to ask for help. Jyn cleared her throat. Smiled. Shook her head, like he was kidding. 

She couldn’t.

“We should start a fight club,” she blurted out. So many terrible things had happened during the war, she tried to contextualize with jokes, like so many of the guests that night had done. She hadn’t had to talk about these things in  _ years, _ maybe even never since she saw him last. One woman referred to Poe as being a good little soldier someday and Jyn almost slapped her. “All the former students. A rematch between me and Lisbon, settle who’s uglier once and for all.”

Cassian took a deep breath. He seemed concerned. 

“Jyn-”

She waved him off, the action leaving her off balance. One more drink had been a bad idea, “I know what I look like, it’s fine, it doesn’t bother me, he actually-”

Cassian caught her hand in his. 

“Jyn, Lisbon killed himself. Six months after Endor.”

Jyn couldn’t breathe. She set her glass down. Covered her mouth. 

Cassian could have happiness, she could get over that; even if it didn’t mean it was with her. 

Lisbon never getting a life beyond all the pain he had been through and caused in kind; that was what broke Jyn thoroughly by this visit. 

She was numb as Cassian ushered her to her hotel room, concerned and caring as always. He took off her shoes and lay her in her bed; no touching, all gentle words she couldn’t pick up in order to remember someday. She wished she had, because she even knew in the moment she needed them.

"He will never know that it would have gotten easier."

He gripped her ankle, the most he'd really touched of her bare skin this visit. "Maybe he did it because for him it never would."

"You have to survive this. What _was any of this even for_ then?"

He squeezed, staring at her toes in his lap. "Not everyone can survive what you did," he told her honestly. 

"You survived so much more," her face was red, twisted and angry tears, "Look what you accomplished, Cassian, are you ever proud of yourself for that? You _should_ be."

His thumb swiped at the arch of her foot affectionately. "Thank you."

His voice was very quiet, very vulnerable. No one had said that to him before. 

“Come here,” she mumbled into her pillow. He drew close to her. Took her hand. Squeezed.

When he met her eye, there was a vulnerability there;

“One more night. One more night we don’t talk about.”

Cassian kissed her cheek again. His thumb brushed the hair out of her eyes. Shook his head. 

“It’s different because  _ it’s you, _ Jyn, that I would even be tempted. But it’s not fair to someone else. I can’t, and I don’t think you’d feel the same way about me if I was the kind of person who  _ would _ , ruining everything for just one night to never talk about. We all deserve more, all three of us.”

She nodded. Even on her drunken ears, he had a point.

He'd offered her _all,_ and she didn't take it, it was unfair to ask for just a cheap cut. 

This other woman who got to see that leg she hated so much. That he trusted with his body. 

Jyn had given that up, and she couldn’t say she regretted it, wouldn't take back her quiet little life after so much pain, couldn’t say he was wrong about his rejection, couldn’t say that this was painful in an unfair way. Maybe this was maturity. Ten years ago she would have hauled him out a window over turning her down, after all they’d been through. 

“Just sleep?” she compromised. 

Cassian cast his eyes around the room, conflicted. 

“Cassian, I wouldn’t try anything, I know what you’ve been through. I’m not pushing you to have sex, ever.”

He let out a breathy laugh. “When you want something…”

“I find ways to get it, but there’s only one way I’ll be able to get you as I want you.”

He curled up beside her, strangely vulnerable for someone who was supposed to be taking care of her in that moment. 

“And what’s that?”

She brushed the ends of his hair with her fingers. 

“The right time, the right place, and your enthusiastic consent.”

He smiled shyly, her fingers touched curiously at his lips, but he caught her hand and pulled it away. His eyes twinkled at her guilty, caught look. 

“You make these things sound possible.”

She rolled onto her back, head tucked against his arm. “You have to hope.”

They just slept. 

They ate breakfast the next morning together, sunny and warm and bittersweet. Then she had to go home. He tried to make her laugh every chance he got before they said goodbye again. She let him succeed. They said farewell on good terms, not ashamed by a one night stand or a rejection. It was neither. It was just them. 

Maturity made for understanding, almost as much as love did. 


	9. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was fifteen pages single-spaced, do not read this before you go to work, I cannot promise you a prompt arrival. 
> 
> A lot of pre-TFA canon had to be glossed over, I am sorry in advanced but I had so much research to do.

They all spoke over comm links in hushed whispers; that  _ it was like before _ . Leia was holding what she could together and cauterizing barriers around what she could not. Jyn was remembering the rhythm of her old life. No one wanted to admit it out loud, so they chose to say it hushed; that it was like before. 

Shara was the first to openly acknowledge what they were fighting; the first to acknowledge and the first to die. 

 

After she returned to Lah’mu from a week of taking care of her Dameron boys, Bodhi found himself at her door. It was late, but the only time you can arrive on someone’s doorstep like that was at that kind of hour; exactly when you got there. 

She had just gone to bed after a long day of traveling. After a long week of making meals no one felt like eating, propping up one of the bravest man she knew to greet mourners, holding the child who wasn’t a child anymore who was the closest thing to a son she’d had.

The last thing on her mind was her almost ever-present worry for Bodhi.

“Jyn, I had to leave.”

Jyn pulled her sweater closer around her body. 

“Where, Bodhi?”

She reached a hand out, touched it to the side of his face. His eyes flit every which way. 

“The Jedi Temple.”

She pulled the thumbnail of her free hand between her teeth. 

“That’s where you were? All this time?”

Bodhi stepped forward, trembling, pressing his brow to her shoulder. 

“Luke and I…”

He told her the story like he was remembering it in bursts. She made caff and they sat around in her tiny kitchen not even remembering to drink it. She’d had a lot of stale cups of the stuff grow cold in her hands that week. 

The shy boy from Tatooine and the shy pilot from Jedha. Their secrets and their similarities and their quiet, hidden feelings. 

“I think he forgot he didn’t have to fight anymore.”

“He’s a Jedi knight, he has to-”

Bodhi shook his head. 

“Not like this, Jyn. Not anymore.”

She wiped a hand over her mouth. 

“Ben?”

They all knew. 

“Luke believes there is light on the other side of what he’s chasing, he just has to get through it first.”

“And you? Seeing it up close?”

“I left.”

Jyn set her mug down. Her hands were trembling. Luke was a better person than that. Leia a better mother. Han, not at all the absent mercenary he pretended to be. 

Jyn was raised by two scientists who loved their family and wanted to do right. These things can happen to the best people. 

She slid her hand over Bodhi’s. He flipped his palm upwards to squeeze hers in his.

“I’m sorry, Jyn. I couldn’t tell you. We didn’t tell anyone. Paranoia-”

His voice dropped off. She saw the unease on his face. It was still hard to tell her, and this was Jyn, as close to a sister that he had.

She nodded. “I’m sorry you felt like it was your secret to keep.”

He finally looked at her face, his eyes had been on the floor since he arrived. “You should get some sleep. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve stayed up all night for me before,” she said with a gentle smile.

His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry Jyn.”

“Hush. I missed you, Bodhi. That’s all.”

He let her hold him, curling up small in her arms. She was still smaller, but they faked it the best they could. 

 

She called Cassian, her voice hushed, as Poe nodded off in front of a holoprojection in the other room. His visits got shorter every summer, he had a lot of friends back home he wanted to spend his summers off with. And with Shara gone, Kes wanted him closer to home. 

She hid herself in the ‘fresher with a comm link.

_ “If it comes to that, you know what I have to do?” _

Jyn laughed humorlessly, tears pricking her eyes. 

_ That. _ Such a hard word to really say. 

“Take a nice holiday on Lah’mu with me? Take up a new trade? Go back to school?”

She could see his grim face like it was projected on the mirror in front of her. She wondered when her marred face had first started to make his exact expressions. She placed her hand on the glass, like that moment in the war room after she lost her eye, the neon lighting his withdrawn face, waiting for a hand to lift and press back. 

_ “I have to fight.” _

Jyn stared at herself in the mirror, trying to isolate her own face from how clearly she could see his. 

“You could die,” Jyn tried to blur her vision, tried not to see him. 

_ “I could take a holiday to Lah’mu. I could kiss you like I was a man worth giving to you. I could do a lot of things first, Jyn.” _

She let him hear her breathe. 

“I could enlist too.”

She heard his hiss through the comm, and the anger in it sparked something in her that brought them back to reality.

_ “You can’t.” _

“Yes I can, you bastard.”

_ “Jyn, don’t waste-” _

“What, Cassian? Don’t sit back and waste the world you fought to  _ give me? _ Like I wasn’t in the same fight you were, I need to be protected from this?”

“Jyn?”

Poe wasn’t a little boy anymore, but there was a youth to his face when she opened the door, comm silenced in her hand. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, Stardust, everything will be fine.”

Wary, feeling stretched thin, she tried to remember her father telling her the same thing. Poe seemed nervous by the nickname. She’d never called him that before. She ruffled his hair.

“Don’t you ever do anything stupid and enlist,” She joked, hugging him. 

Poe, almost at her height, looked up at her with sad eyes, with the kind of expression one has when you love someone too much to say  _ no _ to them; at least out loud.

Her heart broke in two. They had very different ideas about what Shara had fought for.  

Jyn had gotten the news about her brave pilot friend, becoming a sister to Jyn in the way that she was an Aunty to Poe, and spared a weekend of quiet contemplation visiting Leia. She had just sent the condolence letter to Kes and Poe, both of them waiting for a daring pilot on a mission she would never complete.

“Get to bed,” she murmured, kissing his brow, which she also hadn’t done since he was very small. “I love you.”

Trying to comfort a child who was not so much a child anymore felt so useless when she knew the bigger picture of it all. Lying like her father lied. 

“Love you too, Aunty Jyn.”

She wanted to make her words true, to make herself the teller of pleasant truths.

There was a light glowing in her palm; Cassian trying to get back through. She let him in, cautiously:

_ “You fought for there to be an other side to this darkness. I fought because I had to.” _

“You’re an idiot,” she answered, “And I fought for the same reason you did; because it was the right thing to do.”

It was the last time they spoke for some time. At least, back and forth, in their usual rhythm, while she cooked dinner and he looked over paperwork. Maybe there was a mention or two every few months; not in conversation but in messages. 

_ I hope you’re well, I know there was an army of Stormtroopers spotted this week and that was something you never wanted to see again. Neither did I. It made me miss you.  _

_ Not much to miss, I’m afraid. Leia briefed me on the new structure of the Star Alliance, I start in a week. There’ll be nowhere to find you on base, I can already feel myself looking.  _

_ Kalonia’s there, send her my love. If you’re too proud to ask anyone else to check on that leg, she already knows all your dirty secrets and won’t breathe a word. _

**_Doctor_ ** _ Kalonia, and she sends love back. My leg is fine, it just got replaced with a better model two years ago and I feel fine. _

_ Do you need love sent to you too or did you already pack that? _

_ I was all out before I left, I’ll have to pick some more up soon. _

_ Sorry to hear that, was it a mutual depletion of resources? _

_ I depleted, she withdrew. We’re still friends. It was better for the both of us.  _

Though it took a while to converse normally again. Not until Poe was old enough to enlist in the New Republic Starfleet and she cried all night because she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him for it yet. Cassian listened for hours as she sat on her kitchen floor, wondering what Shara would have done. Wondering what her mother, Lyra, would have done. 

“Did Lisbon do it because he knew? He knew that it was all for nothing?”

_ “Jyn, no. You can’t talk like that. Do you need me to come to you? Are you alright?” _

“I’m fine.” In the relative scheme of it all, she was fine. 

_ “You have earned the right to sit this one out, Jyn,” _ he promised her.  _ “I’ll do the fighting for both of us, if you need to live the way you that know now.” _

 

It was time to stop avoiding it. She and Bodhi went to visit Chirrut and Baze. A spiritual trip, of course. 

Chirrut spent most of the visit with Bodhi, whose mind was flickering between guilt and loss, and Baze and Jyn just sat around the small temple the guardians had found their home in, joking about the people they both sullenly loved.

“We may have another war,” Jyn leaned her head on Baze’s shoulder. She felt him breathing, his tranquility. His hair tickled her cheek. The man who had the balance of a perfect shot nearly every time. He was so much older now. 

“Trust in the force and it will guide you.”

Baze, a man of quiet faith, was able to share it under duress. 

Bodhi seemed eased into a place of comfort by the end of the week, both he and Jyn blurting out their conflicted desire to enlist at the same time. Fear for the other flooded their hearts. 

As they were leaving, Chirrut pulled Jyn aside. 

“You seem at peace,” he observed.

She shrugged. “I’m as good as I can be, you know?”

“Your soul has come to a point of rest. And I sense one catching up to you.”

She did cry, then, because it felt true. 

When she hugged Baze goodbye, something flared in her chest, a burn in the kyber crystal she still wore. 

She knew then it would be the last time she would ever see them. She hugged tighter, and told Chirrut and Baze that she loved them.

When she pulled away, she saw that they knew it too.

 

There wasn’t much time to ponder her nature; war called, and Jyn answered. 

Leia asked for her specifically. 

“I need people I can trust around me,” she said. The First Order was squeezing like a fist around her throat. The first time Jyn saw a stormtrooper again, even just in an image on her datapad, she burst into tears. 

Jyn left to fight for Poe. Her heart squeezed at his confidence to face battle. She could help train him. She could protect him. She could be there as more than just an Aunty on a ramshackle hill. 

She did it because it was what was right. 

After she accepted, she called Cassian. He was already at Leia’s side, a General already. 

“You know what I have to do.”

She heard the smile in his voice.

_ “How can I help you do it?” _

She wept into her hand, her shoulders shaking. 

“As long as you’re with me, I can do this.”

She, at that point, could feel his smile like a star burning in front of her. 

 

Jyn was unpacking in her new bunk, cozier accommodations than the last war afforded her. Leia was certainly keeping the people she trusted close, as Jyn hadn’t found a singe off-limits part of base or the datafiles to her yet. She wandered around the sunlit space (a room with a window in these barracks was in itself a luxury), examining the drawers and shelves and temperature settings to get it as comfortable as possible for her first night when an old comm link she had remembered to pack buzzed from her bag.

She dug it free. Pressed it to her lips. 

“Come again?”

_ “I’m here.” _

“I heard you were-”

_ “Just landed.” _

She nearly tripped over her own feet crossing the room to pick up her keys.

“Give me five minutes.”

He laughed. 

_ “Haven’t I waited long enough?” _

Jyn floated to the hangar bay, not quite connected to reality. 

She walked through the gate, and he was just un-boarding his ship.

He had a distinguished gray wired through his hair, a weariness to his eyes. But that shy smile was all his, and when she connected to him again, arms around him and heart pounding, he lifted her feet off the floor with a quiet laugh. 

This was such a different moment than in Leia’s kitchen, stumbling around being adults, trying to piece together the maturity to be good company. Trying to get over the shock of it, trying to experience each other again without sitting in the corner just running their hands over each other’s faces or some other madness. They were in this for Leia; but they were there for each other. 

“There’s my girl,” he said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. The rush of his real voice, no longer smothered by a comm link, ran through her like a wave.

She tried to punch him in the back, but with her arms over his shoulders she could really only pull back by the elbow and weakly knock it against him.

“Don’t get romantic, I’ll cry.”

Cassian shook his head, squeezing her tighter. “Don’t cry. I’m happy. Don’t cry, Jyn.”

 

Their trainees whispered about them. 

There was no concrete evidence; but there was a sense for these things in young minds. It might have been the supportive camaraderie; pats on the back and the lightness in which they regard each other curtly as “Erso” or “Andor”. Maybe the smiles that curled their mouths around the words. It could have been their gravitational pull towards each other, during training projections and meals where they stood at the back of the room, arms folded, heads bent towards each other, quietly laughing. How he would pace an arc behind her when she was speaking like an attack dog. Jyn would just lurk in the background when he had the floor, and despite her glowing military title, whispers of her dark eye implied shadier days, as did her association with the now nefarious Han Solo. 

Poe fielded all questions with gravity and mischief, as the expert on his parent’s friends from the war. All of his wildly exaggerated tales demanded some form of retraction, to which Jyn achieved by not addressing the actual issue but undermining his credibility with good natured jabs about worrying about more his footwork and less about gossip, with a leg sweeping out to knock him squarely on his ass.

Cassian found her after such a lesson, Poe whining about a possible bruise as he stretched breathlessly out on the mat, Jyn chuckling and shooing her trainees out of the room, Poe included. 

“All of our students call us ‘mom and dad’,” he had a smile in his voice as he approached her.

Jyn raised her eyebrows as she pulled a sip of water from her canteen, rolling her eye after the moment of confusion passed. “That’s because  _ Poe _ calls us ‘mom and dad’.”

“Poe  _ has _ a mom and dad.”

Jyn’s heart softened at the defense for Shara, the one that she would be making if she was standing right there, alive. 

Poe still had Kes. And Leia was already proving a surrogate as much as Poe was for her.

“They want us to take a hint,” she smirked at him. She froze after she said it. It just slipped out. She really hoped that this wouldn’t...

He knocked her off balance by nudging her with his shoulder. “Stop that.” 

But he hid his smile poorly. 

She regained her footing with a laugh. 

“What brings you here?”

He slid an arm around her shoulders, squeezing once before letting her go. “Lunch.”

She missed him, when he pulled away, even though they walked to the mess hall together and she was in his company for a whole other hour. 

 

As the galaxy around them was thrown deeper into chaos, the galaxy between them grew still. The orbit of it steadied. It was a rhythmic swirl of understanding. 

They hid this, from themselves and from others, because while a perfect storm, it was delicate. 

After the tragedy at the Jedi Temple, with Leia given the unending agony of not a dead child but a  _ lost _ one. Bodhi also broke his indecision and re-enlisted. He could not speak of Luke again. Jyn had heard about Han through a conversation with someone who definitely was not Leia, but everyone who mentioned it to Jyn had different revelations in sordid details, so she often forgot who told her first. 

Leia kept Poe at her side, a surrogate son, which peeved Jyn a little bit because she had never claimed maternal ownership of Poe but for a few weeks in the summer; even after they all lost Shara. But her heart softened, both needed each each other in different ways, and as her presence as Aunty was eclipsed by Leia as a leader, she had more time to herself. More time for the budding comfort of Cassian’s presence. Less time to worry.

Not that it stopped her, every time Poe was taken through flight simulations, getting closer and closer to his first time in the sky.

 

One of his trainees caught Cassian digging through her pack- not even  _ digging _ because he just dove into a side pocket and there was the extra headlight he had forgotten to pack and knew she kept there. It was an efficient unit. The admirable quality of understanding. Instead of looking guilty over being caught, he just went onward with the headlight, and Jyn stumbled on the still-open back and snapped at him to at least zip it back up after he stole her shit. 

Despite the illusion of greater intimacy, there was little more there than what was seen in public space. There were no nights of passion or private moments. The gossip was created implying a tip of a greater iceberg, but under the surface they weren’t together, they were just alongside each other. 

She knew the end of his last relationship wasn’t anything traumatic, and didn’t really want to get into it why he chose to break things off. Just like he didn’t ask about the occasional mistakes made at a bar or two a year for her.

The two of them and their joint evaluating gaze, shared between three different eyes, as they assessed combat drills with their arms crossed, muttering under their breath to each other as they watched their teengers,  _ their kids, _ as even that started to feel true. That was all there was to it; and that was everything. When her laughter rang out, sharp and true, twenty sets of feet readjusted on the mat, all suspicious they were the ones executing their stance wrong. They were nothing but professional, but an affectionate professional; comrades. 

But sometimes they had personal briefings, or helped plan tactical moves Leia wanted feedback for, so as time passed it was more common to be in each other’s rooms and the moment Cassian was caught leaving hers by a student was the beginning of the end.

Jyn yawned over his shoulder, scanning the datapad in his hands. He rolled his eyes. 

“You’re not even awake.”

She shook her head, trying to jar herself into awareness. She rubbed her eye with a limp hand.

“I am too.”

He laughed, turning off the screen, despite her protest. “You don’t have to stay awake during your free time for my benefit. We can find time to look over these files when you’re rested.”

She crawled off the edge of his bed sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the energy I once did.”

He caught her elbow, hauling her back with a good natured smile. 

“I didn’t say  _ leave.” _

She raised her eyebrows at him. He stared at the hand in his lap, furled against the fabric of his trousers. Glanced up, a shy look in his eyes. 

“I’m, um, going to keep working. But if you wanted to rest, you can just take a nap here.”

She covered her mouth with her hand, considering the offer. 

“Do you want me to?”

He nodded, swallowing. “You don’t have to walk all the way back to your room. And I like the company.” 

She lay down, he picked up the datapad. 

“I’m going to keep tinkering with the scout positioning. I’ll wake you if I have a breakthrough.”

“As fascinating as I find that…”

She snuggled into his pillow. What a lovely introduction to his bed. 

His hand rested on her calf as she slept, something to ground her to the unfamiliar/very familiar smell of him and the different feel of his sheets. Softer, somehow. 

Groggily, she heard him yawn, and pulled him down by the shoulders to rest beside her. He was stiff for a moment, but as he relaxed his lips brushed over the brow of her lost eye.

“You okay?”

She felt his sigh more than she heard it. 

“Yeah.”

 

Their much needed post-mission R&R usually ended in one of them napping in the other’s room. There was sleep and then there was  _ these naps _ . Neither would admit how safe it made them feel, always citing practicality, or the host throwing out an insistent invitation to have a lie-down on their bed instead of walking all the way to the other’s room.

He approached her after one of her class, a common enough occurrence, students dissipating around them. Already whispering with hushed laughter. She smiled up at him, grabbing her equipment bag to walk him wherever he would inevitably be due in ten minutes. Such was being attached to Cassian Andor; he was taken away often.  

“My students say we’re in love.”

Cassian grinned, with that sad, tentative hope still in his eyes. After all that time. 

“Aren’t we?” he said, stepping close, sighing as he bent to press his face against her collarbone. She had to take a step back to regain her balance with him so near, wrapping her arms around his waist. 

The training room was quiet. Private. Safer than their rooms. 

She remembered Chirrut’s words, about the soul coming to a point of rest, both souls, and being ready. 

She felt it too. 

“Well,  _ if Poe says,” _ she reasoned, her hands smoothing up and down his back.

_ “Jyn.” _

An unspoken  _ ‘answer the fucking question, you monster’. _

She pulled her head back to look at him. He lifted his face from her skin, the ghost of a mischievous smile on his face. 

“You want something?” she joked, her eyebrows raised expectantly. 

“Jyn, I could stay alongside you for the rest of our lives, and you know that. But I’ve waited for you for so long, so can you put me out of my misery first? I’m  _ dying _ here.”

She smiled, kissing his ear. 

“You know. You know I do.”

As soon as she said it, the joke left her spirit, and she let out a shuddering breath, realizing the mass of what she just admitted. He squeezed her tight, cradling the back of her head in his large hand. 

“You sure?”

_ “Yes, _ Cassian, don’t be dense.”

He pulled back, curling his hand gently under her chin.

She was still breathless when he kissed her. 

“Cassian, what if we screw this up again?”

He shook his head, smiling wryly. His brow pressed against hers.

“We won’t.”

Jyn’s large eye examined his face for hesitation. “I can’t lose your friendship.”

He kissed her brow. “You never have. Don’t worry. We’ll most likely die in combat before that ever happens.”

A person any more sane than them would be afraid. Jyn just laughed, punching his arm. And he kissed her again; because he could. 

 

Calmly, over lunch, she was told Poe just shipped out on his first mission. 

Cassian had now kissed Jyn, slept alongside Jyn, loved Jyn, and once had to stop her from nearly breaking a priceless bottle of wine on the floor; but he had never had to hold her like she held him on Endor. 

Bodhi found him this time, and Cassian knew how much had changed when it wasn’t Bodhi hiding Jyn from him, but prioritizing him as what Jyn needed. He was sent to her room, where she was in even worse shape than the last time she was on base and Poe left her, because that time she got to say goodbye. There were three Damerons then.

“No one told me this was happening.”

He placed his hands on either side of her face, holding her gaze to his steady eyes. They looked like they ached as much as she did. 

“I didn’t know either.”

“Leia knew. Leia planned it.  _ Why didn’t she tell me?” _

“Jyn, we all have to make sacrifices, we all knew that kid was a natural.”

_ “Pushing a child _ to greatness is not good leadership.”

“He wanted to do this. He had his father’s support-”

“But that doesn’t mean he needs to lead a mission by himself at this age! This is what Skywalkers do. It’s what she and Luke did to Ben-”

She covered her mouth, horrified. 

Cassian shook his head, and pulled her into his arms, rubbing her back; just letting her say something she would regret outside of privacy. 

Sometimes that’s the greatest kindness one can give, when given without judgement. 

“He’ll come back,” he promised her. “I mean, he’s our kid.”

Jyn covered her mouth, choking back a sob. Cassian sat her down on her bed, resting his chin on the top of her head. 

“He’s not ours, because we could keep him from going if he was.”

Cassian kissed the crown of her head patiently; “Leia couldn’t stop Ben from going, you cannot stop Poe. And no matter what, Shara couldn’t have either. And I think we both know that this is what this is really about.”

Jyn released her breath, gripping his arm. Her thumbnail found its way between her teeth, chewing it down to a jagged edge. 

Something in her dreamlike grief struck her, “Where’s Kay?”

He reached for something at his belt, secured on a carabiner. A collection of programming chips. “There was that mass purge of imperial droids a few years back. It wasn’t safe. All the essential parts are here.”

“Then why don’t you reprogram-”

He stared at the floor, his eyes watering. “He kept breaking down, and I kept putting him in a new shell, and rebooting that kind of control over a body, even for a droid, it was getting too hard for him. He asked me not to-”

Jyn’s lips went thin, and she pressed her brow to his shoulder. She had never thought there would be a day where there wasn’t K2. 

That last human compassion Cassian had given his friend was an honorable death, and the privilege of being remembered.

Poe came back. Jyn gave him her portion of dessert but also held him in a headlock before letting him eat it. He knew he had hurt her. 

But what was most important was he learned he had her forgiveness. 

 

The next nap in her room, Cassian’s head was in her lap. It felt nice to play with his hair as he slept, vulnerable, with soft shoulders. It was such an easy intimacy. 

She still wasn’t sure exactly where he was physically. He initiated their touches, and she never tipped the scale past the weight he gave. It made for slow going, and less reciprocation than she would have liked; but he made it clear he could not be pushed and she took the cue without question.

She wanted him though. She was already learning from being close to him was that she didn’t dislike sex; she disliked sex when it wasn’t with  _ Cassian.  _

She smiled, stroking his hair, glad to have him back safely. Perfectly fine with just that even if she secretly wanted more for someday.

When barely awake, he pressed a kiss to her bare thigh. She’d changed into her comfortable sleeping clothes for the rare free time, a tank top and shorts, and Cassian had arrived around the time the breast band had come off, and she wasn’t about to put it back on. It was  _ Cassian, _ for force sake. 

Sleepily, he mouthed at her sensitive skin. Her lips parted for the quietest of pleasant sounds, and his eyes fluttered open. 

Both were too scared to move.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, pulling his head away. 

She shook her head. “Didn’t mind at all. Sorry if I took advantage.”

His hand rested on her leg, thumb working circles on the exact skin he had just been kissing.

“Didn’t mind?” he questioned; a forced, casual tone.

She swallowed. Nodded. “Not at all.”

Testingly, he returned his lips to her inner thigh. She shivered, he moaned. 

“Jyn?” he questioned, sounding slightly afraid.

“I’m here,” her hand tangled in his hair, “I’m with you. This is about you. Do whatever you want.”

He closed his eyes, gripping the leg he had his mouth on. “Are you sure?”

“Abundantly, Cassian, I like it a lot. But don’t do anything you don’t feel ready-”

His lips pressed back down, sucked hard on her reddening skin. Her leg jerked in response, a whimper drawing from her lips. 

“I want to do this,” he admitted, glancing up at her eye. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

Jyn shifted for him to lie between her legs. 

“I like it,” she said, “but only if you want to.”

He groaned desperately, nodding like he was barely listening. 

“Cassian-”

_ “Yes, Jyn. I want to.” _

The first steps to getting it there were mechanical. He lifted himself up to help her ease her shorts and underwear down to her knees. He seemed to panic after that point, and she drew his overthinking head close for a kiss. He smiled after that, remembering where they were. 

“Go as slow as you need,” she reminded him, arching into his kiss. He focused on that. Grounded himself on that. Gripped her waist with greedy, searching fingers, inching down to tease her where she was getting very wet.

It took no time to get her off, even for the first real time. Her hips dragged slowly against his mouth. He moaned into her, revealing a desire he’d had to hide for so long. His hands dug possessively into her hips, an ownership no one in her life had earned before.

He stroked himself as he licked and kissed at her, but when her shaking hands tried to pull him close for his turn, he merely lay back down beside her. 

She spread a hand on his stomach, searching, and he flinched. She lifted her hand guiltily. 

“That’s all I want,” he swallowed thickly, “that’s all I want right now.”

Jyn let her body body limp on the sheets, staring at the ceiling. She nodded. A laugh released from her lips, and she covered her face in her hands. 

“Cassian, are you alright?”

He nodded, gave her a real smile, a shy one. 

“Are you alright?”

“I’m happy,” she said, pressing a kiss to his lips, shuddering in delight at her own taste there.

 

It still took a while. He made her cum with his mouth, his hands, his words. But it still took a while, and the pleasure was compulsive, almost detached, and Jyn grit her teeth because it was good and he was showing he loved her but he couldn’t let her reciprocate yet; and if he’d been through anything less she might have taken the lead and pushed him. But she  _ couldn’t.  _

_“I want to touch you too-”_ she pressed, once. He released her nipple with a soft _pop_ of his lips. He stroked his hands up and down her back, with her standing shirtless in front of him and him seated at a desk chair, needing a break from his briefing research because all the words were starting to blur. 

Her arms crossed protectively over her chest. He nodded up at her, smiling thickly;

“I just...want to take care of you.”

His next words were comforting, dirty and low in her ear. She wrapped her arms around his neck, burrowing her face in his shoulder. 

He pulled her into his lap, her bare body against his clothed one, but he still only used his hand to get her off.

She could take a problem; she could not take a problem he refused to talk about.

Doctor Kalonia smiled sadly when Jyn told her about the slow pace, patted her shoulder, and told her she’d better do her research. 

With shaking hands, she found the contact information of the psychologist he was involved with when they met at Leia’s party a few years ago, firing off a few anxious questions about how to properly handle their relationship by asking for a professional and personal opinion, and for Cassian’s own good hoping they had broken it off amicably. 

Being the nature of this past relationship; a pleasant and needed one, but not a passionate one, she did respond with a few academic and medical texts Jyn could peruse about affirmation and trust for trauma, and best wishes for Cassian’s improvement, referencing how far he had come already. Jyn read them like a teenage boy with pilfered dirty datafiles.

Cassian had an upper hand. When he caught her staring at him, worrying, he could just flip the hem of her shirt up and mouth at her breasts until she forgot what she was thinking about. That mouth might have ended their first fight after Scarif in minutes; what a waste all of this time had been. 

The obvious solution was so obvious it never came to her before it happened;  _ that he wanted the same things.  _

“I know you’ve been patient,” he said one night, his hair sex-mussed but his own unspoken needs still hidden and un-met. She lifted her head from his shoulder, training her eye on him. He cleared his throat. “I know you’ve been patient with me, and I wanted to thank you. I’m sorry I can’t give you more right now.”

She rolled him over her, resting on her back with his face cradled against her sternum.

“You’ve given  _ everything, _ Cassian.”

He shook his head, his brow pressed to her collarbone. 

“No, Jyn. Not to you. It’s harder...because it’s you.”

She bit her lip and waited. Listened to him breathe for a few minutes. 

“I used to have dreams about you,” he admitted finally.

She’d had dreams about them, and felt guilt. For the body that wasn’t really hers. After everything they’d been through, she was possessive, he was always in her thoughts and when she was in a state where she couldn’t control them…

She felt guilt about it.

Her thumb ran up and down the back of his neck. “That’s alright. You couldn’t control that.”

He shook his head. “You’d reach out to me, and I’d crawl to you. Wanted you. You were lying on a metal table. But the moment I touched you, your skin went blue and felt like ice. You weren’t breathing.”

“Just dreams.”

“They picked someone who also looked like the daughter of the imperial officer. You and Moll both looked like her. I- you two would blur sometimes.”

Jyn nodded, tears pricking her eyes. “I understand.”

“It had to be someone else first, before it was you. To make it real. To clear through that. Do you understand?”

Jyn nodded. “I’m not afraid of what needs to be done to make you better.”

There was a lot there, between them. He had to learn to trust anyone, and choosing her to be the first was a loaded and over-complicated mix. She’d take a trusting Cassian who wasn’t hers over one made worse by good intentions. The files his ex had sent her helped immensely. She had to be careful with him. 

 

It still took a little while, but sometimes the way her head tilted back when she laughed made him bolder, ease forward another small step. It was Jyn, all this time, it was Jyn. Something in a specific smile made him braver. Something in the way her thighs trembled around his ears made him crawl up her body and slot his hips between them, rubbing gently against her, letting her fingers tangle in his hair. 

Once, she remembered his statement about the destruction of his skull he dreamed about, and held his shoulders instead. 

How kissing, once, for what felt like hours during their rare free day turned into rubbing and turned into them both naked under the sheets and ended, not inside her, but with his cum on her thigh and her arms around him and her soft words telling him that she loved how it felt with him and she hoped that he felt as good as he had made her feel. 

It didn’t feel like a failure; it never did. It felt like an effective use of their time together. 

He looked so at peace. Making slow progress to gently guide himself to a place of rest. 

Jyn realized something about trust. She was so focused on him she maybe wasn’t communicating it back. 

When he next came home from a long mission, draping himself on the bed next to her and murmuring in her ear that he wondered  _ where exactly she wanted him to place her hello kiss, _ she took it from his lips with a smile. And rolled over to face him. And slid the patch from her eye. 

“I missed you,” she admitted with a bare face. “And you are the love of my life.”

He stared for a moment. 

_ It’s my face, _ she thought to herself,  _ I have always worn this on my face… _

The trust she demanded needed a sacrifice of her own.

"you're beautiful," he breathed.

He kissed her, right on the brow of the missing eye. He undressed as he did, and in time bared the body that was only hers before in the dark and under the sheets. 

The light stayed on. 

“Thank you for waiting,” he whispered into her hair, hiding his face as he guided her hand to where his thigh gave way to machinery. She kept her hand still on his body, guiding his chin to look at her. 

She had expected this to go another way, but the look in his eyes told her this was where she had to know him first. In what was missing, and what was repaired. 

“It was worth it,” she kissed him, hand steady, until her fingers flexed on the seam at his thigh testingly. He looked down at her, breathless. “I don’t think it could have happened any other way, because I don’t think I could feel more for you then than I do right now.”

She pressed a kiss to his lips to stop the tears from coming, because she was happy, he was home and they were together and she was happy. He seemed to feel that way too. 

“Can I look closer?” she whispered into his lips, and he nodded, lying back and letting her stroke her hand up and down his hips as she examined him. Thinking about the false bone that had to be grafted onto what wasn’t there anymore, even after all those years, made her ache in wonder about the pain. She squeezed his hip, realizing she was naked with Cassian the first time, and he looked relatively calm, compared to six weeks ago when he had flinched away when she undid his belt. They shared a quarters, she had seen the leg itself, seen him sleepily dressing in the morning or brushed past him the ‘fresher before bed, blearily looking for something to sanitize her eyepatch like Kalonia taught her. This was different. 

She kissed the edge of his stump, where the nerves were still alive. His leg flinched under her, but his hands tangled in her hair. 

“Are you alright?”

He sighed.  _ “Yes.” _

“Are you with me?”

“Where else would I be?” and he sounded so outraged she laughed.  

“Just making sure. Touch yourself first, and then you’ll get my hand.”

He nodded. When his hand moved over his cock, she saw how hard he was. He groaned as she watched. 

"You're beautiful," she breathed, and he arched into his hand. both legs scrambled for purchase on the sheets, real and fake. She'd never seen the fake on in connection to his movement, the black material strangely graceful against his skin.

He brought a free hand to her face, looking in both living and dead eyes. 

"So are you. I have always wanted you, Jyn."

She had begun to fear he would never want this. She didn’t hurt to lose it for herself; she just wanted to be in the same place with him in all things. 

Her small hand intertwined with his fingers, and he moaned, dropping his hand for her to stroke him by herself. She watched his face. 

“Is this good?”

“Yes.”

“Are you close-”

“I want to-” he clutched her jaw between his hands, drawing her down to kiss him, “I’d like to be on top, this time.  _ Please-” _

“That’s fine,” she rolled over, smiling up at him, “you don’t have to rush-”

“I’m ready.”

“Are you sur-”

He shook his head, huffing out a laugh.  _ “Now _ you’re so patient.”

“I am,” she realized, the dead lid of her whited-out eye fluttering along with the live one. “I don’t know when that happened.” 

She had always been, inside. Only a girl with her profound patience and hope could have gotten through so much. 

He paused, and nodded, grinding into her open thighs, and she let out a moan.

“There’s my girl,” he murmured, “patient as a saint.”

Her hand lifted from his bad leg because he lowered his weight down on her, kissing her hungrily, and through a few huffily laughed out  _ “Yes, yes Jyn”- _ s he was inside her like she was home mixed with divinity. Her back arched. He let out a cry and kissed her, rocking his hips in a hungry thrust. Her whole body was  _ quaking.  _

The right time and the right place could not be named, only recognized with wisdom. It was here. 

 

There’s a girl with brown hair on base, who doesn’t feel like she belongs. A lost girl on base. Who wanders. Who’s worried about her friend. She’ll have to say goodbye soon, and she’s not ready, and she’s scared. 

But she is also ready and brave. 

She’s looking for a nervous-looking pilot who has a message. She was told to find him before she went to find Luke Skywalker, that he had a holoprojection that the Jedi needed to see. Not officially. Whispered in the halls to her, in a tone of profound sadness. Not of a mission; but of missing.

Then she sees them at the corner of the mess hall, staying late to the end of the meal when all have almost cleared out. The pilot, and two generals, and Poe, who introduced himself after she was released from the medbay. 

The girl feels a little stronger knowing someone else cares about Finn too. 

She doesn’t yet know Bodhi heard about this imperial defector who did the hard thing because it was right. And that he will be keeping an eye on Finn; a proud one. 

She doesn’t know the scary female general only scares you until you say two words to her, and then she melts, and that Finn will make her laugh her way through every goodbye she ever says to him. She’ll keep an eye on him, but only one. 

She isn’t powerful enough yet to see that Cassian will be there, with a comforting hand to his shoulder, because he knows what it’s like to be treated little more than a machine in a war.

Leia will lead with the decisions no one else was brave enough to make. 

And Poe’s kindness will shine through, the only one deserving of the kindness in Finn. 

People who have not made Finn into what he is; but will understand him. Finn will be safe with the people at this table. 

Maybe she doesn’t know it yet, but sees at this table full of people;  _ belonging. _

Sees the tired-looking man behind the tough-looking general, who lifts the graying hair at the base of her skull, escaping a messy bun, off the the side to kiss the skin under her ear. Her body rests against his shoulder, a small smile on her face. They are tired as they guide their young into a new generation's battle, the only way a seasoned veteran can. With kindness and profound sadness.

They are tired, sagged against each other, a force of contentment. 

It gives her hope. A moment of profound and private kindness. 

The force around her, that has placed complete thoughts in the palm of her hand as a solid construct buzzes again. Rey opens her hand to it. 

There’s a light there; like a flame that goes flat in the final seconds before being blown out. But before that, there’s this complete moment of knowing;

_ It had to have been Jyn; the only one in the galaxy with enough patience and strength to stand firm, with her hand reaching out halfway, ready to pull Cassian home.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I feel this story needs a little send off. 
> 
> I cried a little finishing this story. A lot happened since I started it. 
> 
> Mostly I've met you readers, who have been so wonderful and supportive and kind. I'm overwhelmed by how communicative and lovely and open you all are, and how you turned this into a conversation. How it went from a four-chapter story on disfigurement and self esteem and became this monster. 
> 
> Thank you all for comments, for those who haven't spoken before, and to my angels who commented ever chapter; leave me one last one. Say hello, say goodbye. 
> 
> You all have my love. Remember your strengths, forgive your weaknesses.
> 
> Be a little kinder than you have to be.


	10. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise. 
> 
> Months ago, I had my tumblr followers vote on what work they wanted a bonus chapter of, and surprisingly, this shit show won by a landslide. That vote was set to determine your Christmas (Holiday) present; I guess you guys like pain. 
> 
> This is a story that has wounds that are hard to reopen; there is no judgement on passing this chapter up, but my promise remains from this summer. This story has a happy ending. I cannot begin to describe how this story, and you readers, have had an effect on my year. Attempting 'fluff' in the burn-verse was no small feat, but one you all deserved so incredibly much. 
> 
> Also. This chapter was 14 pages. If you have Christmas wrapping to do, this can wait.

Jyn’s eye flew open at the sound of a loud bang. 

And fluttered shut with amusement when a soft stream of cursing filled the space next to the bed. She shifted under the covers, nudging her head into a higher peak of the pillow instead of the part her sleeping head had nested down.

“Are you alright?”

The answer came from lower than if he was standing, so he might have been hunched over in pain.

“Hit my leg on the side table.”

She rolled onto her hip and propped herself up on her elbow. It was still a sleepy motion, but there was more than one occasion where he’d nearly kneecapped himself on the edge of that table in the darkness. Her hand reached out into the darkness, upwards and open. “Oh no.”

The sound of his shoe hitting the floor was the only response

The mattress dipped to the empty side, and he was already sliding under the sheets. 

“The  _ other _ leg,” he explained, and with a smirk, she heard a metallic sound of his knuckles against his false one, “didn’t even feel it.”

Cassian still clutched her hand, squeezing once as he settled down next to her. 

His other hand cupped her hip, and she shifted the incline of the curve to spread his hand further across her skin. She could sense him smirk in the darkness. 

“Hello,” he finally breathed out, because the sentiment had been skipped. 

“Hello,” she responded, slithering close to press her chest against his. He sighed in relief. “I missed you.”

“Mhm,” he agreed, resting the bridge of his nose against hers, “missed you too.”

He’d taken to doing that, his face smushed close to hers, where the scaly skin of her burn couldn’t be ignored. At first his suspicion was that she didn’t like anyone touching it, but then there were slight indications that her discomfort was in her suspicion he was merely stomaching the feeling for her sake, which led to frequent, reassuring brushes of his soft skin against the nerve damaged half of her face. Just to prove her wrong.

“So content to just go to sleep,” she mused, bringing a finger up between their mouths to trace his lips. “You must be getting old.”

He growled, as he did when she brought up his gray hairs  _ (which she loved) _ and had her spine flattened down on the mattress in seconds. Even if he was slower now, his body was still leonine and strong. He held her wrist steady, biting her finger tip into his warm mouth, breath ghosting into the web between the two fingers, until she fidgeted under him, thighs falling open, pulling her hand free and weaving it into his hair. 

His hands danced over her thighs, his smile a little shy and excited because this was what he came home to. She let herself finally go slack when his fingers dipped inside her, teasing out her longing, his own expressed in soft words pressed to her neck, lifted from her skin only by his breath.

There was a tremor in his body above her, and she pressed her hands to his belly to support his weight over her.

“Is it hurting?”

He relaxed into the cradle of her open hands, braced at the wrists, his legs adjusting with an expression of focus before answering.

“Not yet,” he said, but it was labored, so she glided through the darkness with a gentle push until he found himself lying on his back. She was on her knees above him, her sleep shirt riding up and her spine angled down in a slope to press her lips to his collarbones. He was sensitive there, and arched towards her when her lips found the spot with her tongue. Jyn snaked a hand down to the thigh above the metal leg, expertly kneading the muscle there that trembled and jumped under the pressure. It bothered him at night, kneeling over her usually caused it to ache after extended time, and it had been a long journey home. 

He groaned appreciatively, too sore to be self-conscious. 

Her other hand fisted in the material of his thermal to leverage her weight against if she ever chose to move from this spot.

“I see nothing burned down while I was gone.”

“You say that like you’re the one keeping this all together,  _ General. _ ” She smirked against his lips. She released the now-relaxed leg and unfastened his pants. 

Jyn was never the  _ ‘welcome home’ _ type, she was too insecure in ever offering what she had as a semblance of a home. The dilapidated sense of security she had built through all these years was hard to feel proud sharing. Cassian made up for it in his determination that what they had could be transported across galaxies and it would only depend upon the seconds it took to connect two bodies in whatever form it took. A hug hello and goodbye between missions where they had no time, or the nights like this, where they could share their bed, and pretend everything was solid and safe and good.

That had betrayed the entire secret. One of her students had once recounted that his father was a General whose mother had greeted him with a warm smile and a stiff drink upon his return every evening, a nostalgia shared by none of the more diverse members of the class.

After Poe, Jyn had her collection of little shits, endeared to her only but furiously so, and one raised a smart-ass brow and called out to her; 

“Erso, what do you greet General Andor with?”

Jyn had barely looked up from checking the knots of her boots; “If he barged into my room and started demanding a drink  _ or a smile, _ they’d never find the body.”

Cassian, who was on a rare occasion, present that day, spewed the water he was drinking across the mats and had to be helped off the floor he was laughing so hard, because as soon as the words left Jyn’s mouth she went white with shock for ruining their well-crafted cover.

Months of throwing up her hands as her trainees grilled her for details, claiming she was too old and too boring to be having an secret affair with  _ anyone _ , was all destroyed in seconds by her need to be a smartass. No wonder she loved her students so much.

That incident, and the gossip that ensued, was how Bodhi found out about them, but Bodhi just flashed her a rare grin and teased her. 

_ “I should have known. Jyn’s collection of jackets seemed to be growing,” he grinned at Cassian over Jyn’s shoulder, “People were noticing.” _

_ She merely stuffed her hands into the pockets of a distressed leather with a commemorative patch- from a battle  _ **_years_ ** _ before she joined the rebellion- shrugging flippantly.  _

_ Poe was a little more resistant, at least in front of Cassian; _

_ “I’m not calling him ‘Uncle Cassian’,” Poe declared, and proceeded to call him Uncle Cassian behind Cassian’s back from then on. _

Jyn’s welcome was nowhere near the one she joked about, but she still felt silly waiting up when she had to be awake the next morning, or wandering base like a lost child until he returned. 

She still had her way of taking care of him. She was a grown woman who wouldn’t sacrifice a needed night of sleep, but she’d clamber out of bed if the situation demanded. 

Usually his leg demanded extra attention; a spare hand in the ‘fresher for balance and to help him get clean, someone to help yank his boots off if he was too miserable and dirty to get it himself, or just an ear to listen if things were terrible out of her sight. Jyn never pictured herself as someone requiring a bedside manner for any partner, the image of a woman in pajamas clucking over the man’s worries one of her mother, not herself, but she had a habit of being what Cassian needed before she thought about what she was doing. And lying awake in a lit room in the middle of the night, over the covers in her pajamas with Cassian seated on the edge of the bed, was a strange, sacred, and intimate time, and the first time in her life she felt like a real adult trying to solve real problems. 

She asked about the mission between kisses, but he seemed to maintain it was standard, routine, impatient to get his hands on her. She laughed at the irritated push of his brows against her chest, raising her up to lift the nightshirt over her head. 

“How’re things?” he slurred as she emerged out of the fabric, shivering as she tossed it aside. 

“Fine,” she ran her hands down his torso as he removed his thermal, “Bodhi took a hit, he’s in the medbay but he’s fine. If you have time tomorrow-”

“I’ll stop by, try and cheer him up” he leaned forward, the muscles of his stomach tensing as he sat back up, and she worked his fly open. “How’s the kids?”

She laughed breathlessly, his lips on her neck, but she crawled back, almost feral in the bend of her knees and hands on the mattress, to pull his trousers down his legs. 

“‘Kids are fine,” she joked, “I suppose we have to discuss Poe’s progress report-”

He shook his head, pulling her into a kiss.

“Can you-”

He pulled back, suddenly very still. She waited, gripping his trousers in her hands, staring with a curious expression. 

“I want,” he swallowed, “I’d feel better...if I took it off.”

Her hand jumped reflexively to the strip of fabric she wore slung over one eye when she slept, but he wasn’t looking at her face. His fingers were jumping along the seam of the false leg. 

“Oh,” she said quietly, touching the back of his hand. 

They hadn’t done that before. It scared him too much. There were still nightmares where he woke up suspecting Moll took it. He had admitted to Jyn once he’d rather deal with the pain than have to bear not having it. 

He was a lot like Jyn, in a lot of ways. The security of feeling that you could run was one of the most soothing feelings in the world. Even if you didn’t have to anymore, it never went away.

She realized she was thinking too hard, and nodded. “Yes. Of course. If you want.”

Eager to show support, her hands fell on his thigh. She’d never removed the limb itself. He never let her. 

Jyn hesitated when she touched the scarred skin, but he nodded and she eased it from the socket of the brace. He let out a little sigh when she placed it on the foot of the bed. 

She placed her hands on either side of his face. “Just talk to me, okay? It’s right there.”

_ Moll used to take it.  _

Feeling like an old married couple was rare for them, considering how this started. However, eavesdropping on her recruits at bars was a hobby she had taken to, especially when they didn’t know she was there. 

“My safeword is  _ Gungan, _ ” one of her trainees announced from the booth across from theirs, and Jyn hid her laughter in her palm. Cassian had a better poker face, but the sparkle in his eye laughed with her. 

“What’s our safeword?” she mused quietly, in a low voice that traveled under the frequency of the bar so only he could hear it. 

He shook his head, finally cracking. “I figured with us it’s just…’stop’, or ‘I don’t like that’, did we ever need to find something else to say that we would honor just the same?”

There was a time she was afraid to say no to Cassian, and he was afraid to say no to her. She hadn’t realized that was the fucked-up-pace of those early battles after Scarif. _ I don’t want this, but I don’t want to lose you. I don’t entirely trust you to come back if I push you away, so I have to balance on the edge of a razor for you. If I set you down, you won’t be where I left you. _

The statement, uttered shyly and with absolute faith cross a bar table, was an expression of trust; that she felt in a radiating heat. 

She felt it then and with her arms around him now, lowering herself onto his cock as he was tense underneath her, his one foot dug into the mattress as if he was sort of ready to fling her off. 

She grabbed one of his hands and lifted her right leg, tucking his hand to curve around her shin. She leaned opposite the upward push of his hand, almost showing that this was a move that would push her off balance, off of him, if needed. Cassian pressed up once, testing, and then pulled her back down. The slide back down the length of him gave her chills, but she ignored them to examine his face. 

“Good?” she asked softly, and he nodded.

She rubbed her hands along his bare shoulders. Didn’t move for a long minute. He seemed to appreciate this, and in a rush of released breath, kissed the center of her sternum; first thankfully, then wetly with a hot, open mouth until she shivered and canted her hips. He lifted his face at her motions and smiled, hand slipping between their bodies to stroke the motion out of her again. Her face fell into the crook of his neck. 

“I’m not going to throw you off of me and across the room,” he laughed out. “Sorry if that was a concern.”

“A simple ‘no’ would suffice,” she toyed with the hair at the nape of his neck with idle fingers, rolling her hips against his, glad to have his bare skin against hers again. 

He leaned back, resting his head on the pillow with the attempt of a smug smile -she’d be doing a lot of the work- but it was shaky in the vulnerability of the moment. “I know.”

She pressed her palms against his chest, lifting her hips and sliding back down his cock. 

Jyn could  _ feel _ his discomfort for just lying back. She tried to keep touching his chest and face, fingers dancing along his collarbones and she guided the pace of their gentle fucking.

“Does it feel better this way?”

“I can’t... _ do _ as much…”

She cupped his face in her hands, guiding it to her breast. He shot her a look still perceived in the dark and followed her doctor’s orders, kissing around her nipple with a focus that always seemed to pull him back. She trembled -an indication he was doing right- and that calmed him.

“Then there will be nights where you wear it, is all,” she soothed, “does it usually bother you?”

Cassian pulled his lips away from her skin with a wet  _ pop _ . If he was in the state of mind to be playful about it, they were pushing through the fear with relative success. 

He shook his head. And then stopped. And then nodded.

She realized she was grilling him while he was lying on his back and feeling a little more vulnerable than he liked, so she lifted one of his hands from the top of her thigh and and kissed it.

“You can’t do as much, but that’s no excuse to do  _ nothing _ ,” she chided in a dry, mocking tone,  _ “you know what to do.” _

He rolled his eyes at her, but raised himself back up to have her on his lap like before, his lips wrapped around her other nipple as she writhed over him. His warmth against her skin was enough to make her melt against him, but with a growl, he grounded himself with one leg and rolled his hips from underneath her. With his foot flat on the mattress and his knee bent, she was flush against him and he could manage it. His grin was mildly self-impressed after he righted a millisecond of lost balance; his elbow falling to their pillows, then his hand lifted to card through her hair. The bucking was rougher, harder for him to do with finesse like this, and bounced her more than usual. Jyn loved it. She went limp around this time, enjoying his somewhat victorious growl as he pressed little kisses under her ear. She delighted in the ultimate pleasure; him curling her up in his body without being weighed down by a phantom limb.

  
  


Han would not be coming home again. 

To Jyn, it was already her reality. She had not seen him since the awkward passing-by as she was coming and he was going from visits with Leia, and with each year, he became less real, and Leia’s pain saturated her image of him. He was still a valuable friend, from the old days.

He had not wanted war to keep them all together again.

Still, Leia was alone in this fight, and Cassian and Jyn tried to hold her together without Luke, without Shara, without Lando, without Alderaan, and now without Han. And unspokenly, without Ben.

Leia was very beautiful, but sad, which is why she wore fatigues and didn’t braid her hair and kept Poe standing at her heel.

“Trauma is genetic,” Leia murmured to Jyn, her voice gravelly, both of them steeped in a few drinks. “I watched my entire planet blow up. I wonder how much of that was in Ben.”

Jyn kept her lips sealed, because it was too hard to talk about; both Leia and Han were ambivalent to the topic; their thoughts always shifting through a jumble of grief, and an outside opinion made their imaginings collapse into anger. 

She remembered a moment with Cassian; unthinking, standing close behind him to reach past him for a taste of what was on the burner. He was trapped in the angle of the counter coming to a corner, her body unintentionally crowding tight, with the hot burner at his side. 

_ “Don’t crowd me,” _ his voice was sharp. It came as a direct order, and a little panicked too. She stepped back, stunned. The spoon in her hand clattered against the table. 

Cassian  _ never _ snapped at her. It wasn’t his nature.

He placed his hands flat on the countertop. “Please don’t crowd me,” he repeated slowly, as though trying again when reminded of his lack of manners. 

Jyn nodded, even though he couldn’t see her. She stared at his back, the twitch of his wrist. She smoothed a hand on his shoulder blade, stepping away from the kitchen altogether. 

“I shouldn’t have-”

_ “I’m sorry.”  _ He didn’t turn around.

She rested herself a few feet away on the length of countertop, reaching a hand out to cover his. They couldn’t look at each other. She knew he wasn’t wrong to snap at her. She also knew she hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, it just hit him at the wrong time. She tried not to feel the overwhelming shame his tone brought on. Her face was flushed when she spoke. But she didn’t run.

She took a deep breath, “It’s  _ fine, _ Cassian.”

He shook his head. 

“Look at me,” she pulled him closer by the hand, and he allowed it, if he was facing her. Her hands cupped his cheeks. She shrugged lightly, “I should have known. I’m sorry.”

He tucked his face in her shoulder. There was a soft groan against her neck.

_ “I just panicked.” _

He was trying to explain, calm himself, and make up for it in one moment where he could do nothing. Clawing your way out and preventing yourself from falling are two very different things and cannot be done at the same time, try as you might. 

“It’s okay.”

Jyn stroked her fingers into his hair. 

“You weren’t wrong to assume I  _ should be better by now- _ ”

She folded him down, his head in her lap. He had to hunch over to do it, but she gently stroked his head as he curled himself to press his ear to her torso. She hated seeing him like this, when the self-loathing couldn’t be held back and he had to let it out. It was often during an outburst about something completely unrelated, and analyzing mind that she had, she was blind to  _ what they were really talking about _ in some of the smaller arguments. Now it was second nature. She recited the instruction; don’t take it personally, not in the moment.

“I would have throw an elbow, in your position,” she laughed a little breathlessly. “I should have been more careful with you.”

He shook his head, burrowing closer into her embrace. That was something. That was more than enough.

They weren’t perfect yet. They probably never would be. Even if they could have had all the time in the world.

Jyn had never forgotten that conversation with Leia. Weeks later, she was thinking about it as practice was over, her new crop of trainees filing out, when Cassian slipped into the room with a datapad (he brought the datapad to make it look more official and business-like) and rested his chin on the top of her head, hugging her from behind once everyone was gone. 

“Our kids,” he said quietly, fondly. There was a pregnant pause. “You ever think-”

It was like the floor dropped out from under her. She remembered her last conversation with Han:

_ “I still love her,” he had said gruffly. Jyn had not known how to answer that. “It’s just when I look at...Ben, I either see myself, or I see her, and I don’t want to think about what we could have done-” _

And she remembered the quiet, awkward dinner after that night in the kitchen. A night with a heavy focus on Cassian, reassurance, trust, tranquility. She was willing to give it. 

But this was not an attention she could divide, especially with a war going on. That wasn’t fair to her commitment to him. 

“No,” she cut Cassian off, her jaw quivering. 

She felt him swallow. He leaned down, kissed her temple. His chin then rested on her shoulder, closer but not prying.

_ The guilt opened up in her. Genetic or not, everyone of collected students was nursing the same wounds. He’d been wonderful in helping her. New recruits had a habit of asking for her in the middle of the night when they were going through something bad, and he usually made a later appearance with a mug of something warm and maybe spiked while she comforted a crying teenager. She was taken from his bed to do so, after all, it was no secret anymore. The reasons for the tears were familiar ones, as part of their genetic code as brown hair and fierce tempers. Missing a mother. Coming to terms with everything that was taken away. Self-justifying murder.  _

_ Hugging a crying trainee, trying with all her might to ease the pain into herself and out of this child, was the hardest thing she could ever do; but she would stand it. Cassian would rest a hand on her shoulder, and settle on the floor near the bunk, gently coaxing out a funny story about their latest mission or something he’d noticed in practice, and Jyn’s heart broke. She had Poe. She saw it in Cassian’s eyes. He had wanted something like this for longer than she ever knew. _

_ The night would end with a sleepy roommate rolling over and joining the conversation, the bubble of tension and grief broken, and they’d all go to bed a little warmed.  _

_ She had found it impossible to love him more, until that had started. Jyn had admired many things about Cassian Andor in her time knowing him. Many of them were brutal and appealed to her survivalist mentality. His incredible kindness, one so fierce he was once willing to let her hate him if it meant trying to help her, was one she didn’t think she’d ever deserve. _

“I know. It was just a thought.”

“Did you want kids?”

He sort of laughed. His thumb stroked idly at the skin exposed at the neck of her shirt, thoughtfully. They had to have this conversation without looking at each other; because they weren’t perfect yet. 

There had been a time where he had. Where he wondered. That this was what he fought for. Jyn slipped easily into the face of his childhood self, the two of them running through the grass in Lah’mu as Poe described it after his annual visits. The safety of two parents walking patiently behind. He wasn’t sure if he pictured himself as the adult or the child; or which one with more longing.

But there was no use in adding to what he had already built with Jyn. It was what it was; which was a neutral truth honed by many cruelties. 

He squeezed once, what she hadn’t expected, and when she craned her head to look back at him, he smiled sadly. 

“Don’t we already have them?”

Jyn swallowed the grief; they may not have passed anything on to  _ their _ babies, but they were waist-deep in children in differentiating levels of trauma just the same.

It was too late for anything else. But Jyn wasn’t afraid. 

Cassian would not leave. 

 

Jyn was now accustomed to the talks her parents had; wartime concern and pajamas. Cassian slipped into their room after a long mission, and this time she was still awake, and he sat on the floor to pull off his boots, too tired to even make the effort to stand up and stretch out in bed. She lay across the foot of the bed and stroked his hair, his head cushioned on the mattress as he stared at the ceiling.

He cleared his throat.  

“I have a little money saved.”

Her hand, fluttery and loose, fanned across the base of his throat. “Buy me a big ring.”

He laughed, lifting her hand in his rough one and kissing it. She smiled, pressing her face into the sheets, her bare shoulder sliding against them in a rare moment of focus on the sense of touch.

“You’d throw it back at me and yell at me for wasting my savings.”

“That’s what you think,” she rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. “But you seem pretty sure then, if that would be my objection, that I  _ would _ marry you.”

He sat up a little straighter. “Do you want to?”

“Hmm,” the bed shifted as she shrugged. Her voice was light and careless. “If it matters to you. Not that it would really change anything.”

“There are spousal benefits in both of our salaries.”

“Fine.”

He snickered against her palm.

“That easy, huh?”

She laughed, lifting up on her elbows to look down at his face. His expression was incredulous and a little dry. 

“I’m getting old. It’s too late to find someone else.” 

“I’ll fill out the paperwork tomorrow.”

_ “Romantic,” _ she drawled, tousling his hair.

He pulled a face at her, and she shot a similar one back.

“Well, I wasn’t trying to be.  _ I _ wanted to talk about something else.”

She propped herself up on her elbow. “Fine, what is it?”

He played with her hand in his, looking at the slim fingers against his palm. 

“The money… do you want a new eye?”

She bit her lower lip. “You don’t care about that anymore.”

There was a mild threat there. A measured tone. A sting that would never really go away. 

He kissed her palm. “I don’t mean your scars. You’re beautiful. Would you like a working eye?” 

The disfigurements were so bad that the lack of sight always seemed like an afterthought. It hurt too much to think about in the days there was an option, as awful as that option was, and she just lived without it until everything was good again.

She sighed, trying to remember placing her vision between two eyes. Her brain had worked out the inconsistencies now for so many years. 

Jyn didn’t outright hate the idea; but the idea made her uncomfortable. Cassian turned to look at her, up on the bed, wincing as he shifted his weight to his knees. 

“I’m sorry-”

“What about you?” she blurted out, motioning to the source of the pain. He looked a little sheepish, eyes on the floor. 

“In this matter, after everything we went through, you come first. We’re not even worrying about me until you are taken care of.”

She shook her head. “It’s a limb, Cassian.”

“ _ It’s an eye, Jyn _ .”

She shrugged in response, his intensity scaring her. She knew this was his way to try to make it right. She also knew that to have risked hurting her by having this conversation again, he had been worrying about this for a long time. And she knew now, with resounding clarity, that he had been trying his best to fix them since the first day he saw what Scarif took away from her. This man could not give her a father back, or a childhood, or even a safer galaxy. But he would try. He would give her all he could. If it meant ripping his heart out of his chest-

She reached out and gently tapped a finger against his closed lid. 

“Not now. Maybe...we’ll see how my vision is, when I get older.  _ If _ I get older-”

Cassian grunted in protest.

“ _ -Maybe _ I’ll need it, and that can be when we talk about it again…”

She rolled onto her back, taking a deep breath. “Okay?”

He nodded. “Sounds like a good plan.”

There was a small smile shared, and then he lifted himself off the floor with a groan and settled on the mattress next to her.

“Cassian?”

“Yes Jyn?”

“We’ve taken care of me. Now we’re talking about this.”

He sighed, hands on his belly. “I…”

She lifted herself on her elbows, glancing down at him. He scrunched his eyes tightly at her examination. 

“You want it.”

He answered evenly, as though seeking a diagnosis; “There’s some pain that has been starting up again, as it does every couple of years before I get a replacement. You know. I just need the updated…”

“No,” Jyn sat up fully. “You need the one you weren’t ready for after Scarif. The real one.”

No more removing a metal limb. Nerve repair and skin and reflexes. Once, while very drunk, not knowing Luke Skywalker nearly well enough to do this, she splayed the hand that replaced the one he lost at Cloud City out on the table, him blushing as she gripped the wrist under a thorough examination. 

_ “I just want to see what they can do,” she told him, “it’s for a friend.” _

That hand vanished from Skywalker’s body soon afterward, replaced by a more skeletal model.

Cassian was breathing very evenly in and out through his nose. “It’s complicated, Jyn.”

“Then tell me.”

_ The removal of the false limb had gotten easier, because there was nothing but concrete, definite experimentation. He couldn’t manage being on top of her, but he could go down on her easily, preferred it sometimes, without the clunky old limb getting in the way. She wondered when she stopped having heart flutters when he told her he liked something, instead focusing on the dry, the addition to the routine so she wouldn’t forget. Her mouth tight around his cock was objectively pleasurable -in theory- when he was lying on his back, the false limb cast onto the floor, but the subjective, the memory, had him fist his hands in her hair and lift her away, a shaky hand pressed to her bare shoulder.  _

_ “Don’t like i-”  _

_ Jyn nodded, understanding, helping him roll onto his side so he could stretch his hand to the floor to retrieve the leg if needed. She laid herself beside him instead. _

_ “I’m sorry-” _

_ “You stopped.” he patted her shoulder, breathless, “You’re fine. I just need it to be quiet for a minute.” _

_ It wasn’t the first or last time he’d needed this. _

_ His eyes were tightly closed, and she hummed out what wanted to be a sob and stroked light fingers up and down his arm. _

“I’m fine without it.”

“Even if we make do without it, doesn’t mean we have to say no to it. You have the savings, I’ve been shooting one-eyed for so long you would ruin my accuracy if you popped another one in there-” he finally let out a relieved laugh in response “-let’s give you something. I want to.”

“You gave me  _ everything, _ Jyn.”

“Well then, consider this a threat; I’ll think less of you for being unable to take more, Cassian.”

Her face fell once the joke slipped out of her mouth, the implication a cruel one, but he just smiled sadly up at her. 

“I can take anything for you.”

She clambered backwards to peel the sheets back.

“Then take this good thing, and kiss me, and get into bed, and we’ll go to Dr. Kalonia about our options this week.”

She turned out the light at the bedside, and felt him slide his way up to her. There was a smile on his lips. 

“Jyn?”

“Yes Cassian?”

“We’re still getting married, right?”

“Oh,” Jyn covered her face in her hands. “Right. I completely forgot we said that.”

 

Bodhi woke up in the Medbay with Jyn curled up on his bedside, over the covers but tucked in anyway. 

“You know you’re like a brother to me.”

He sighed back into his sleep, trying to blanket himself in ending this conversation. “Yes, Jyn. As you are to me.”

Jyn’s smile was slightly unhinged, which meant she had a secret. 

“Will you give me away?”

_ “What?” _

“I’m getting married in twenty minutes. We need a witness. One who won’t tell anyone.  _ Don’t tell anyone. _ Also, will you give me away?”

She clutched his hand, shaking it with her excitement. Bodhi just stared at her. Jyn was going slightly gray around the temples- but she’d only had ten years off from war in her entire life- and in a moment of panic realized how  _ old _ everyone was getting. 

“Did you tell him?”

Cassian appeared in the doorway, datapad in hand.

Bodhi gazed warily at the General. “How long have you two been-”

“She said yes two nights ago. Then she was called for reconnaissance in the jungle, and I have an off-planet mission in forty minutes, so we’re improvising.”

“We’re doing it  _ his _ way, because waiting isn’t  _ his thing.” _

He shot her an incredulous look. He’d been waiting for this long enough.

“Speaking of which, we should get going. Bodhi, want to be my best man?”

Jyn typed out something on the datapad; their pilot realized they were filling out the registration as they were talking to him. “Already asked him to give me away.”

“He can do both, the droid just needs a sentient witness to sign off on the paperwork-”

Jyn was already dragging Bodhi out of bed. She and Cassian were overlapping every sentence, biting and  _ ‘yes dear’ _ and laughing in sharp, surprised laughs. Like they were surprised the happiness kept hitting them, that the emotions were unexpected to ever be feeling at all. 

Bodhi found himself walking with them only thirty yards to where a droid held a screen, Cassian signed and added a thumbprint, Jyn signed and added a thumbprint, Bodhi signed off, and Jyn slid her arm through Bodhi’s elbow. 

“Thanks for giving me away,” she teased, from the lack of ceremony, and Bodhi kissed her brow. 

He looked to Cassian, who was looking at Bodhi as though asking for something like permission. He remembered the night behind the crates, when Jyn’s lost eye was the biggest problem outside of the war they were all fighting, where Cassian’s cruelty was chalked up to vanity. Bodhi was a kind person, so he was always kind to Cassian. Bodhi had forgiven long ago, it was his nature. 

But Bodhi was also the closest thing to Galen anyone had left, other than Jyn. 

“You’re not anyone’s to give,” he said, nodding to Cassian and then Jyn, “except your own.”

Cassian’s breath fluttered out from his nose. 

“Not to interrupt; but General Andor is expected in the hangar bay in five minutes.”

Jyn’s hands fell casually over the droid’s screen, fumbling until the whole thing went dark; powered down out of spite. 

Cassian pulled her close for a quick kiss, and said his first words to her as husband and wife;

“I should be gone for about three days. You have three days to make me regret this.”

She smirked up at him. “Done.”

 

“How do you make someone fall in love with you?”

Cassian smirked, and Jyn barked out a laugh. Poe’s arms encircled her shoulders, his chin on the top of her head. While usually a smart-mouth, he seemed genuinely curious.

Poe found a rationed chemical sweetener and tried to make them a cake for Cassian’s return; Bodhi told Poe about the secret wedding. The dry, crumbling cake was impossible to enjoy, but the company was easy to. 

“I’ve had enough runny eyes in my morning classes to know you have never struggled to make  _ anyone _ completely enamored with you,” Jyn took a punctuating sip of caff, “or is this hypothetical? Conceptual love is meaningless in my book, it’s just the stuff you promise in the beginning and can’t follow through on.”

Cassian was staring at her, quite pointedly at that.

“What did I do now?”

At this, she laughed, batting at his arm.

Poe was quiet as he watched them, with Jyn’s feet propped up on Cassian’s chair, and his elbows resting on the table as he worked on his datapad. He’d probably interrupted or joined Jyn for hundreds of meals in his life, and seen Cassian with Jyn, nearly glued to her since enlisting, but the private moments where Jyn’s focus was shifted away from just being his Auntie were jarring ones. Where he felt he was interrupting. 

Poe clicked his teeth a few times, still resting on the top of Jyn’s head. “Not entirely hypothetical.”

Jyn, usually the most disinterested in gossip, did stir at that. “Is there someone in the foreseeable future? You never let me meet your little friends.” She reached behind her to pull at one of Poe’s curls, and he extracted himself from her grasp.

_ “Mom. _ That’s because you always embarrass me  _ -and that remains to be foreseen…” _

He took a seat across from her, which made the table now divided in thirds. He’d never had to share such a large fraction of Jyn’s attention, and the eeriest was she was altogether unchanged by the presence of Cassian. He kept waiting for the alteration in her behavior to come. 

“How to make someone fall in love with you…” she mused, and Cassian jerked, which implied some deceitful placement of her feet under the table. 

Self consciously, Poe’s hand dipped under his collar, stroking the chain that held Shara’s ring. Jyn’s expression softened. She reached out and touched one of Poe’s curls, at his temple where the hair was softest. She’d nuzzled her face against that head when it was just covered in black down when he was a baby. 

Jyn had never thought she’d see a person grow up, the completion of it, the beginning and end; only glimpses at certain phases. She and Cassian couldn’t be together until they were adults. Her parents and Shara were frozen at the age she had now passed. Lisbon was always going to be a screwed-up teen. 

**_Did you really want kids?_ ** _ She repeated one night at the end of a nightmare. Her voice cracked when she said it. Jyn's heart was beating at the terrifying pace of **too late.** He was already holding her, because he never missed an opportunity to try and make things right by her. That was a strange sensation, Cassian in the dark. After all the searching and listening and perceiving, it had all been for these moments of crushing together and only giving their voices and the nerves on their skin.  _

_ She remember that man on Jedha, who knelt in front of her actively disassociating self while the city was crumbling around them, and he broke through to her. The most distrusting person he had ever met. His urgent eyes and the patience there. Pulling her out of the void she was sealing herself into.  _

_ There were days she wasn’t sure whether destiny or strength brought them together.  _

_ He was very calm, very still against her, an irreplaceable balm for bad dreams.  _

_ “There was a point…” _

_ He felt the tremble in her breathing. But he knew what she had wanted, and she deserved so much more than she had ever gotten, so he would have sacrificed this and more to give her one less thing to worry about. But he also owed her, for the rest of his life, his honesty. “Yes. I when would look at you holding Poe. It was hard. I wanted you to be the mother for my family.” _

_ Jyn just pressed her face into his chest. She nodded, because it must have hurt him, that all this time had passed, and all these things proved possible; but this one thing was not. He threaded his hands into her hair. “I wanted you to love what we had as much as you loved him.” _

_ “I’m sorry.”  _

_ He shook his head. _

_ “It’s not like that,” his tone was lighter than hers, and she could sniff out a false sense of levity from him any day. This, at least, was true; he wasn’t too upset.  _

_ “You had to be stuck in this world again, with me. You can’t leave it, you don’t have space outside it. Don’t you ever ask yourself what you’d be doing with someone keeping house on Fest with a squadron of miniature Andors underfoot?” _

_ “Jyn, that’s not what this is about. It’s not about you  _ **_failing_ ** _ me. It’s about where we are now. Poe was only a kid when the First Order began to rise. Even if we had started -when the hell could we have started- you know as well as I do we’d be here, in The Resistance. And we are here now, so that’s all there is to it. We have kids. You gave me so many damn kids.” _

_ Every time Jyn left his bed in the middle of the night because she’d gotten a comm from some scared soldier, he fell in love with her a little more. _

_ He laughed softly, “Don’t let this keep you up at night, not while I’m with you. I wouldn’t take any of it back.” _

Poe was that life. The long, dependable stretch of time and age. He had always been. 

“What to do to make someone fall in love with you…” she repeated thoughtfully, trying to find the right thing to say.

“Jyn, you’ve never had to work for someone’s love, that goes against everything about you. You just kind of exist and we love you anyway,” she laughed, because that was only something Poe could get away with saying, though she did kick the leg of his chair to knock him off-balance and almost fall on the floor.

She hadn’t had to work for Cassian’s love, but she’d had to work for his life, so what they had was a little more than love. No wonder she scorned conceptual, full-of-empty-promises love.

“As it should be,” Cassian said faintly.

Poe finally turned himself towards her husband, and Jyn found herself surprised by what he said next. He never objectively disliked Cassian as Jyn’s partner, but he never liked sharing her attention and wasn’t exactly warm to the idea yet. 

“I kind of want to hear what Uncle Cassian has to say on this one.”

Jyn held up her hands, recusing herself. Her expression was surprised, and a little guarded, when she glanced at Cassian. He looked thoughtful.

Her lips posed in a careful smile over the lip of her mug.

“How did you ensnare me, please, I’d love to know.”

Cassian spoke from experience, his tone marvelling:

“Do everything wrong, and then wait,” he mumbled into the heel of his hand. 

Poe would never possibly know what Cassian meant, but he had never heard Jyn laugh harder. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only thing I can ask of this point is if, reasonably, this was a story you didn't want any addition to, or there was a quality dip, please don't tell me. I forgot how incredibly anxious updating this story made me. This is passed the critiquing phase, and really for the people who asked for more. I'm happy enough with that. 
> 
> And as always; remember your strengths, forgive your weakness, be a little kinder than you have to.


End file.
